The Science of Light

What is light? I will draw a bow from the initial attempts of understanding the nature light more than 200 years ago by assuming a fictitious medium called ether, all the way to the large scale European laser project "Extreme Light Infrastructure" (ELI) developed in Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. On the fundamental side experiments planned for ELI include studying the birefringence of the vacuum and the generation of particle ant-particle pairs from the void. In a way this can be seen as the resurrection of the ether: a Lorentz-invariant quantum ether. The development from Christiaan Huygens to ELI reflects the history of the science of light.