Grappling with his son's death, the painter David explores his grief through art and writing, etching out the rippled landscape of his loss. Over twenty years after his son's death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter's eyes. From one of Colombia's greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.

This classic study, available for the first time in paperback, clearly demonstrates how quantum theory is a natural development of wave theory, and how these two theories, once thought to be irreconcilable, together comprise a single valid theory of light. Aimed at students with an intermediate-level knowledge of physics, the book first offers a historical introduction to the subject, then covers topics such as wave theory, interference, diffraction, Huygens' Principle, Fermat's Principle, and the accuracy of optical measurements. Additional topics include the velocity of light, relativistic optics, polarized light, electromagnetic theory, and the quantum theory of radiation. The more difficult mathematics has been placed in appendixes, or in separated paragraphs in small type, intended to be omitted on first reading. Examples and/or references follow each chapter to assist the student in absorbing the material and to suggest additional resources.

"Explores the budding of unexpected romance in the face of family tragedy, the forging of a new relationship between a daughter and her gifted, difficult parents, and an adolescent girl's confrontation with her own qualities of light and darkness." -- taken from back cover.