Dave: In 1977, I started wondering how I could put together
an international scientific meeting devoted to “Minnaert-type”
things. My main concern was that such a gathering would
be considered too amateurish and therefore inappropriate for
a mainstream scientific conference. I was an NSF postdoc
in the physics department at Caltech at the time, and I had
never organized a meeting before. But at the same time, I had
published a few papers and read the literature. In addition, I
was teaching a course at the UCLA extension called “Color
and Light in Nature,” which used Minnaert’s book as a text.
So I wrote to Jarus Quinn, the executive director of the
Optical Society of America at that time, and pitched the idea
for the meeting. A couple of weeks later (this was in the days
before e-mail), he wrote back and enthusiastically endorsed the
concept. “Round up your organizing committee, figure out a
tentative program and tell me what you think it will cost,” he
said. “If we can do it, we will.”
Deciding on the organizing committee was easy. I simply
picked all of my heros: Alistair Fraser (Penn State), Bob Green-
ler (Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Freeman Hall and Bill
Mankin (NOAA), and Bill Livingston (Kitt Peak National
Observatory). I chose the name “Meteorological Optics” because
R.A.R. Tricker’s book Introduction to Meteorological Optics was
the most up-to-date technical book in the field at the time.
The technical council agreed to sponsor the meeting, with
the American Meteorological Society as a cooperating partner.
OSA even allocated travel funds for several invited speakers,
Marcel Minnaert and The Nature of
Light and Colour in the Open Air
The Dutch astronomer Marcel Minnaert (1893-1970) was a
pioneer in solar research who specialized in spectroscopy
and stellar atmospheres. Like many scientists of his time,
he was passionate about many things beyond his formal
research topics—and one of them was the study of light
and color in the natural world.
In 1937, he wrote The Nature of Light and Colour in the
Open Air, which became a classic among researchers and
was also appreciated by nature enthusiasts, amateur scientists and many others. The book, originally published in 1937
in Dutch, was released as a translated paperback in 1954,
inspiring many American scientists of that era and beyond.
In the book, Minnaert discusses a wide variety of optical
phenomena that can be observed in the sky, on the earth,
and in the water. The common thread is that all of these
things can be seen with the naked eye. He writes:
“The phenomena described in this book are partly
things of everyday life, which it is fascinating to study from
a scientific point of view, and partly things unfamiliar to you
as yet, though they can be seen any moment if only you will
touch your eyes with the magic wand of ‘knowing what to
see.’ … However extraordinary it may seem, it remains a
fact the things one notices most are the things with which
one is familiar; it is very difficult to see new things, even
when they are before our very eyes … and it is strange to
think how blind and deaf we must be to so many things
around us that posterity is bound to notice.”
