ABSTRACT
Whether optics experienced a revolution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been subject to historical analysis and discussion. The seventeenth-century transformation of natural philosophy also affected the study of light: scholars increasingly explained the nature of light and its propagation in mechanistic fashion. Natural-philosophical accounts of light remained, however, closely connected to ontological and epistemological questions. In particular in Cartesian physics, as exemplified by the Traité de physique (1671) of Jacques Rohault (1620-1675), accounts of the nature of light were interwoven with natural philosophy as a whole. Generally, the organization of the science of optics did not change fundamentally during the seventeenth century. Geometrical optics experienced profound changes in content and extension of its subject matter but continued to constitute an independent field of study throughout the seventeenth century. In the methodology of optics, the most drastic changes took place during the second half of the seventeenth century. New ways to account for the nature of light emerged in which experimental and mathematical aspects were integrated. An important impulse for this development came from experimental research, which led to the discovery of several new properties of light.
