Researched
Law of Refraction (Snell)
Willebrord Snell finds in 1621 the exact law for how light bends at a boundary; Descartes publishes it in 1637.
Open in the interactive tree →The sine law of refraction lets lens designers calculate where light goes. It is the base of lens design from telescopes to chip-printing optics.
Prerequisites
- Geometry (Euclid)~300 BC
- Book of Optics (Alhazen)~1021