Everyday Physics: Colors, Light And Optical Illusions

This book aims to popularize physics by emphasizing conceptual ideas of physics and their interconnections, while avoiding mathematics entirely. The approach is to explore intriguing topics by asking and discussing questions, thereby the reader can participate in developing answers, which enables a deeper understanding than is achievable with memorization. The topic of this volume, "Colors, light and Optical Illusions", is chosen because we face colors and light every waking minute of our lives, and we experience optical illusions much more often than we realize. This book will attract all those with a curious mind about nature and with a desire to understand how nature works, especially the younger generation of secondary-school children and their teachers.

Michel A Van Hove was born in Belgium. He studied in Switzerland (BA from ETH) and the UK (PhD from Cambridge University), and worked in the Netherlands (Philips Research Labs), Germany (University of Munich), USA (Caltech, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and University of California at Berkeley and Davis) and Hong Kong (City University, and Baptist University). He retired as Emeritus Chair Professor of Hong Kong Baptist University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was awarded the Ernst Mach Honorary Medal for Merit in the Physical Sciences and the Surface Structure Prize, He is recognized in the World's Top 2% of Scientists. His mainly theoretical research, in physics, materials science, chemistry, and biology, has focused on the determination of the atomic-scale structure and bonding at solid surfaces and nanostructures. He developed and implemented novel methods of electron scattering theory and computation, such as for nanostructures. He also worked on photoelectron diffraction, scanning tunneling and atomic-force microscopy, a database of solved surface structures, and molecular machines (modelled with total-energy and similar calculations). He has over 400 publications, including 11 books, with over 20,000 citations and an h-index of 82 (from Google Scholar). He has been on the editorial board of 13 international journals and book series. He has co-organized 102 international scientific conferences.