Greece in the past and Hellenism
Empedocles thought that everything was made up of four things: fire, air, earth, and water. This was in the fifth century BC. He thought that the goddess Aphrodite made the eye from the four elements and lit the fire in the eye so that it could shine and let people see. Empedocles thought that rays from the eyes and rays from a source like the sun might interact. If this were true, then people could see just as well at night as during the day.
Euclid wrote Optica around 300 BC. In it, he talked about the properties of light. It was Euclid's idea that light moved in straight lines, and he wrote down and studied the rules of reflection mathematically. He asked if sight is a beam from the eye because he wanted to know how someone could see the stars right away if they closed their eyes at night and then opened them again. It's not a problem if the beam from the eye moves at the speed of light.
In 55 BC, Lucretius, a Roman who built on the work of earlier Greek atomists, wrote, "The light and heat of the sun are made up of very small atoms that, when pushed off, shoot straight across the space between the air molecules in the direction of the push." This is from "On the Nature of the Universe" Even though Lucretius' ideas were similar to later particle theories, most people did not agree with them. In his book Optics, which was written around the year 200, Ptolemy talked about how light bends.
India in the past
In ancient India, around the first few hundred years AD, the Hindu schools of Samkhya and Vaisheshika came up with ideas about light. The Samkhya school says that light is one of the five basic "subtle" elements (tanmatra) from which the gross elements come. It's not made clear whether these elements are atomic or not, and it looks like they were thought to be continuous. Sunlight is called "the seven rays of the sun" in the Vishnu Purana.
Indian Buddhists, like Dignāga in the fifth century and Dharmakirti in the seventh, came up with a type of atomism, which is the idea that reality is made up of atomic entities, which are short bursts of energy or light. They thought of light as an atomic thing that was the same as energy.
Descartes
The French philosopher René Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650. He disagreed with the "forms" of Ibn al-Haytham and Witelo, as well as the "species" of Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, and Johannes Kepler. He wrote a theory about how light bends in 1637, but it was wrong because it thought that light moved faster through denser materials than through less dense ones. Descartes came to this conclusion by comparing it to how sound waves behave. Even though Descartes was wrong about the relative speeds, he was right when he said that light behaved like a wave and that the speed of light in different media could explain refraction.
Descartes wasn't the first person to use mechanical comparisons, but his theory of light is seen as the beginning of modern physical optics because it makes it clear that light is only a mechanical property of the light source and the medium through which it travels.
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