Light and the faculty of vision have been subjects of considerable interest from antiquity on. This course will trace the growth in our understanding of the nature of light from the first, groping ideas of the Ancient Greeks up through the work of Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Young and others.
This course will lay the groundwork for a future one-quarter course on electricity and magnetism, which will culminate in the unexpected integration of light and electromagnetism in the work of James Clerk Maxwell.
As in “Foundations of Physical Science 1: Motion and Gravitation,” we will proceed hierarchically. Our focus will be on understanding how our knowledge of light was built up step by step, with each new development growing out of the context set by previous discoveries and grounded at every stage in perceptual observation.
This is a one-quarter course running July – September 2025.
Prerequisites and Corequisites: 200-level courses require that students are enrolled in or have completed the “16-Week Objectivism Seminar” (which has the Fiction course as a prerequisite) or
have completed the “Intensive Seminar on Objectivism”.
Additional prerequisite: Foundations of Physical Science I
Level: 200 Start Date: TBD Live Class: TBD Quarter: Q4
Instructor Keith Lockitch
More information will be added here closer to the course start date.
Course Faculty
Keith LockitchDr. Lockitch is ARI vice president of education and a senior fellow. Dr. Lockitch trains students in how to communicate philosophic ideas and uses his background as a physicist to apply Ayn Rand’s ideas to crucial issues in science and technology. Dr. Lockitch received his PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and has conducted postdoctoral research in relativistic astrophysics.