Author Description

Introduction by the foreword author The ideas of colour and wavelength are so commonplace in the modern world that there are normally no second thoughts about the observational foundations of those ideas. Taking the path of Goethe’s studies on colour, Emir Korkut not only provides a clear historical overview that will help the reader obtain the context of the concept clearly but also points out what is actually observed as distinguished from what is thought out and added to what is observed. This phenomenological approach is a hard task at the best of times, as we bring in so many ideas which appear “obvious” to us at first glance that we do not question it further, but Korkut succeeds in teasing apart the assumptions from the observations for a variety of phenomena in optics. Perhaps the most critical contribution to the discussion is how Korkut never loses sight, in every sense of the word, of the whole image, whether he is discussing light, darkness, refraction, reflection, polarization, diffraction, or any of the other repetitive patterns seen in optics. The ability to retain the whole image in the mind and to break away from the one-sidedness of the ray-tracing habits we have all learnt is made manifest in this work. It is the changing of these habits of observation and habits of thoughts that the book highlights and that shows the coherence to be gained as a result of retaining the focus on the whole image all the way through in optical observations. All in all, Korkut’s work is a brilliant contribution to fundamental optics research that demands an adequate re-thinking of the fundamentals, as such a work should. Gopi Krishna Vijaya, Phy-PhD, Utah Spring 2023.