Read about the life of Isaac Newton and his many accomplishments in physics, mathematics, optics, and religious study, and how his discoveries helped in space research.

For most westerners, and indeed for many Arabs, the spectacular achievements of Arabic language science from the eighth through the 16th centuries come as a startling discovery, as if an unknown continent had suddenly appeared on the...

This site provides a biography of James T. Russell, inventor of the compact disk, and the basic ideas behind the technology.

Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...

This is a ten-question quiz pertaining to spherical mirrors.

Brief biography of Mohammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, famous for his contributions to the fields and studies of medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and physics.

A discussion of Christian Huygens' contribution to wave optics, and particularly to our understanding of the reflection and refraction of light. Excellent diagrams and a geometric proof on why the law of reflection is mathematically...

Under the title, "Thin Lens and The Thin-Lens Equation," this site provides an animation of an object responding to the changes of its distance to the lens.

Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individual atoms in three dimensions, with Gerd Binnig. The achievement garnered the pair half...