Optics is an important branch of physics. It is also a discipline related to optical engineering technology. In a narrow sense, optics is a science about light and vision. In the early days, optics was only used for things related to eyes and vision. Today, optics is a science that studies the generation, propagation, reception and display of electromagnetic radiation and the interaction with matter in a wide range from microwave, infrared, visible light and ultraviolet to X-ray and γ-ray, focusing on the range from infrared to ultraviolet. It is an important part of physics.
Optics is a physical discipline that studies the behavior and properties of light. Light is electromagnetic wave, which is described by Maxwell equations in electrodynamics in physics. At the same time, light has wave-particle duality, and the particle nature of light needs to be described by quantum mechanics.
Optics is a discipline with a long history, which can be traced back to more than 2000 years ago. At first, humans mainly tried to answer questions such as "how can people see the objects around them". About 400 BC, the earliest optical knowledge in the world was recorded in Mo Jing, China. It has eight records about optics, describing the definition and generation of shadows, linear propagation of light and pinhole imaging, and discussing the relationship between objects and images in plane mirrors, concave spherical mirrors and convex spherical mirrors with rigorous words (see History of Physics in China).
In the historical period of more than 2,000 years, from Mohist classics to 1 1 century, Arabian Ibn Al-Haisam invented and made convex lenses. From 1590 to1early 7th century, H. Zhan Sen and H. Lipski independently invented microscopes until/kloc.