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Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
This is the first expression of my thoughts and my experiments with Nature about the mathematical description of the Universe. The theories about our surrounding Nature became popular from our ancient civilizations and may be from the…
What is light and how to describe it has always been a central subject in physics. As our understanding has increased, so have our theories changed: Geometrical optics, wave optics and quantum optics are increasingly sophisticated…
In modern physics courses the idea of photon has been teaching through from the einsteinian formulation based on the photoelectric effect. Einstein's photon concept allow the quantization of the electromagnetic field, but does not dwell on…
James Clerk Maxwell unknowingly discovered a correct relativistic, quantum theory for the light quantum, forty-three years before Einstein postulated the photon's existence. In this theory, the usual Maxwell field is the quantum wave…
We state several ideas based on the view-point of particle behaviour of matter to explain wave character of photon and elementary particles. By using Newton's suggestion of light ray, we clarify integrally the behaviour of light ``wave''.…
The purpose of this article is to show that the standard method of introducing the quantum description of the electromagnetic field -- by canonical field quantization -- is not the only one. We have chosen instead as the starting point the…
Today, the nature of light is accounted for by one of the jewels of physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED), the fundamental theory of light and matter. Yet owing to its infinite complexity, scientists still debate how its central concept,…
The wave-particle duality of light introduces two fundamental problems to imaging, namely, the diffraction limit and the photon shot noise. Quantum information theory can tackle them both in one holistic formalism: model the light as a…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
The Einstein-First project approaches the teaching of Einsteinian physics through the use of physical models and analogies. This paper presents an approach to the teaching of quantum physics which begins by emphasising the particle-nature…
Light Polarization has many technological applications and its discovery was crucial to reveal the transverse nature of the electromagnetic waves. However, despite its fundamental and practical importance, in high school this property of…
Feynman's light microscope invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew about quantum reality. Rather than invoking wavefunction collapse to predict the loss of fringes in a monitored interferometer, Feynman analyzes the problem in…
We describe a simple experimental apparatus which allows one to observe the wave properties of light in a new way. This apparatus also makes possible to introduce and illustrate, in a very suggestive way, some fundamental principles of…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
A textbook interpretation of quantum physics is that quantum objects can be described in a particle or a wave picture, depending on the operations and measurements performed. Beyond this widely held believe, we demonstrate in this…
Modern imaging technologies are widely based on classical principles of light or electromagnetic wave propagation. They can be remarkably sophisticated, with recent successes ranging from single molecule microscopy to imaging far-distant…
These are the lecture notes for a course that I am teaching at Zhiyuan College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (available at https://www.youtube.com/derekkorg), though the first draft was created for a previous course I taught at the…
We present a study of geometric phases in classical wave and polarisation optics using the basic mathematical framework of quantum mechanics. Important physical situations taken from scalar wave optics, pure polarisation optics, and the…