History
Isaac Newton studied refraction in prisms. He failed, however, to recognize the material dependence of the dispersion relation. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have invented the achromatic lens.
Dispersion of waves on water was studied by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1776.
The universality of the Kramers-Kronig relations (1926/27) became apparent with subsequent papers on the dispersion relation's connection to causality in the scattering theory of all types of waves and particles.
Read more about this topic: Dispersion Relation
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
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—David Hume (1711–1776)