{"id":222479,"date":"2025-09-25T12:18:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T17:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/scientist-connected-light-and-matter-century-before-quantum-physics"},"modified":"2025-09-25T12:18:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T17:18:39","slug":"scientist-connected-light-and-matter-century-before-quantum-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/scientist-connected-light-and-matter-century-before-quantum-physics","title":{"rendered":"Scientist Connected Light And Matter Century Before Quantum Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientist-connected-light-and-matter-century-before-quantum-physics.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/three-letters-one-number-a-knife-and-a-stone-bridge-how-a-graffitied-equation-changed-mathematical-history-241034\">carving some mathematical graffiti<\/a> into Dublin\u2019s Broome Bridge in 1843.<\/p>\n<p>But in his lifetime, Hamilton\u2019s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new mathematical tools for studying light rays (or \u201cgeometric optics\u201d) and the motion of objects (\u201cmechanics\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, Hamilton developed his mechanics using an analogy between the path of a light ray and that of a material particle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin\u2019s Broome Bridge in 1843. But in his lifetime, Hamilton\u2019s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}