Capturing Light: A Time Machine from Aristotle to Feynman

What is light? This exhibition serves as an archival time machine, tracing humanity’s centuries-long quest to answer that fundamental question. Told through the rare books and historical documents housed in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections & the Georgetown library archives, the primary exhibit follows the evolution of our understanding of the nature of light from antiquity’s philosophical views to the complexities of modern quantum mechanics.

Visitors will follow a continuous thread from Aristotle’s foundational ideas, as echoed by Francisco de Toledo, past Ibn al-Haytham’s (Alhazen) 11th-century anatomical diagram of the eye. The journey then moves through Newton's corpuscular and Young's wave descriptions of light, shifts to Maxwell's formulation of light as an electromagnetic wave, and finally arrives at the modern understanding of wave-particle duality through the works of Einstein and Feynman. The exhibit also features a focused look at the legacy of physics and astronomy at Georgetown University, highlighting its own contributions to this universal endeavor—from the historic Heyden Observatory and Father Sestini's 1850 sunspot drawings, to the crucial dark matter observations of Vera Rubin.