Abstract

No one interested in the history of optics, the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics, or the general phenomenon of theory change in science can afford to ignore Jed Buchwald's well-structured, highly detailed, and scrupulously researched book. The focus is Augustin Jean Fresnel's epoch-making work on the diffraction and polarization of light in the period from 1815 to 1826. The account of this work (in Part 2) is sandwiched between an account of the intellectual background and particularly of the "selectionist" ideas that Buchwald sees as informing the approach to optics dis- placed by Fresnel (Part 1) and an account (in Part 3) of the reception of Fresnel's work, the controversies with Simeon Denis Poisson and especially with Jean Baptiste Biot, and the "emerging dominance" of the wave theory. No fewer than twenty-five appendixes absorb some-though by no means all-of the more detailed points and technicalities.