Islam, Mohammad: THE GEOMETRIC NATURE OF LIGHT, From Ancient Substrate to Quantum Field. A Continuous-Field Reading of Twenty-Five Centuries of Optical Inquiry

This paper traces a structural intuition across twenty-five centuries of optical inquiry: light is a localized perturbation propagating through a continuous medium that is space itself. The thread runs from the visual rays of Empedocles, through Aristotle's actualization of the transparent, the medieval Latin and Islamic optical traditions, the Newton-Huygens bifurcation, Maxwell's electromagnetic synthesis, and the twentieth-century revolution culminating in quantum field theory. The interpreti