The book Discovering Light: Fun Experiments with Optics has been published, co-edited with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the Optical Society Foundation (OSAF), and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), coinciding with the International Day of Light IDL2021.

This book, which is the English edition of the book Discovering light (CSIC-Catarata, 2018) has been written by 14 young scientists, including the project editor María Viñas-Peña, who met as researchers at the Optical Institute, with a foreword by Prof. MJ Yzuel, and aims to answer questions such as What is light? and other questions related to optics.

The authors have been teaching optics to the general public and high school students for more than 10 years, and that experience was the seed of this book.

The book is aimed at the general public, but with special emphasis on students of all levels of Secondary Education, it presents a wide variety of experiments related to different optical phenomena and instruments, in which the steps to follow are clearly exposed. All of them are preceded by the explanation of the concepts necessary for their realization and interpretation, and accompanied by numerous illustrations and curiosities.

We hope that it will serve as a tool to broaden the knowledge of Optics and Photonics among the general public, and especially younger students.

We would like to especially thank Prof. MJ Yzuel's support as promoter of this co-edition in English with SPIE, OSA and CSIC.


The book is available open: open access, downloadable eBook via the SPIE Digital Library.

The printed version will be available in mid-June