Burnett Lectures, on Light

by George Gabriel Stokes

Excerpt from Burnett Lectures, on Light

In one sense of course this would include nearly every investigation that we can carry on; for in nearly every case we make use of our eyes, and without light they would be of no avail. But it is obvious that it cannot be in this comprehensive sense that the title of the present course is meant to be taken. The investigations actually intended are those in which the properties of light in their re lation to ponderable matter enable us to ascertain something regarding the nature or the condition of that ponderable matter. Even as thus restricted the subject remains a wide one, branching out into other' departments of science, especially' chemistry, miner alogy and astronomy.

119 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, PRS (1819 – 1903) was an Irish English physicist and mathematician. He spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. As a physicist, Stokes made seminal contributions to fluid mechanics, including the Navier–Stokes equations and to physical optics, with notable works on polarization and fluorescence. As a mathematician, he popularised "Stokes' theorem" in vector calculus and contributed to the theory of asymptotic expansions. Stokes, along with Felix Hoppe-Seyler, first demonstrated the oxygen transport function of hemoglobin and showed color changes produced by aeration of hemoglobin solutions.