International Year of Light 2015

Let there be light

The UN’s 68th general assembly proclaimed an official “International Year” that will focus on the science and applications of light, and seek to raise global awareness of how optics and photonics can have a positive impact in fields as diverse as energy, education, agriculture and health.(courtesy:http://optics.org/)

The Year was endorsed by UNESCO’s Executive Board in 2012 before being proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2013.
The International Year will be marked by the commemoration of a series of important milestones in the history of the science of light dating back 1,000, 200, 150, 100 and 50 years:

• In 2015, it will be 1000 years since Ibn al-Haytham published his seminal work on optics, during a period of heightened creativity and innovation known as the Islamic Golden Age. (Read the article on The Miracle of Light);
• Leaping forward to 1815, the next milestone is Augustin-Jean Fresnel’s theory of light as a wave;
• Then comes James Clerk Maxwell’s description of the electromagnetic theory of light, in 1865;
• Albert Einstein joins the Hall of Fame for his general theory of relativity in 1916, which confirmed the centrality of light in both space and time;
• Last but not least, we shall pay tribute to Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson for their 1965 discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, an echo of the origin of the Universe which enables us to ‘map’ the Universe as it would have appeared shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, using sophisticated technologies.(courtesy:http://www.unesco.org)