Light Beyond Physics

There is light beyond physics, both in the very many academic disciplines that involve light, and in the teaching about light using non-traditional methods. In retirement from an academic, then industrial, physics career, I have been heavily involved in such endeavors. I have published two books addressing light beyond physics, one with some STEM-friendly equations and graphs, and one without. 1,2

In 2023 I taught an interdisciplinary sophomore honors seminar at Appalachian State University, which followed my more STEM-friendly book, but focused on the students choosing individual topics of personal interest involving light, doing scholarly research on those topics, and then teaching their classmates. Topics included: optical illusions; role of color and vision in the world of plants and animals; historic pigmentation on classic marble sculptures; designing with color, psychology of color; iridescent phenomena; Light IS waves, Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695); greenhouse effect, global warming, Joseph Fourier (1768–1830); UV, pigmentation, and vitamin D; and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). There was only one STEM student in the class, a math major. Many chose topics related to their majors. A psychology major, for instance, taught us about SAD, which led to a summer job for her. I learned things from every one of these presentations. One thing that I learned through teaching the course was that these non-STEM honors students found the material fascinating, but were generally turned off by the few STEM equations that I included in the core lectures.

This led to my book without equations and graphs, which uses images of art in museums to teach. 2