From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics - Paperbackby A. Mark Smith (Author) From its inception in Greek antiquity, the science of optics was aimed primarily at explaining sight and accounting for why things look as they do. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the analytic focus of optics had shifted to light: its fundamental properties and such physical behaviors as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. This dramatic shift which A. Mark Smith characterizes as the "Keplerian turn" lies