The Talbot-Plateau law is an experimental observation related to the

psychophysics Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, m ...

of vision. If a light flickers so rapidly that it appears as continuous, then its perceived brightness will be determined by the relative periods of light and darkness: the longer the darkness, the weaker the light. The law was first reported in a 1830 article by the Belgian scientist

Joseph Plateau Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repea ...

. This article stimulated the English photography pioneer

Henry Fox Talbot William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS (; 11 February 180017 September 1877) was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later ...

to publish, in 1834, his own observations on this topic made back in the 1820s. While both scientists have followed each other's experiments, they maintained that they conceived the original idea independently. In 1863, the experiments of A. Fick suggested that the Talbot-Plateau law does not hold for strong light intensities. This suggestion was later proven by O. Grünbaum in 1898 who demonstrated that flickering strong light appears brighter than its steady state value.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite book , last=Roeckelein , first=Jon E. , title=Elsevier's dictionary of psychological theories , publisher=Elsevier , publication-place=Amsterdam , date=2006 , isbn=978-1-84972-283-4 , oclc=436849676 , page=590 Talbot-Plateau law
American Psychological Association {{cite journal, doi=10.1080/14786443408648474, title=XLIV. Experiments on light , year=1834 , last1=Talbot , first1=H.F. , journal=The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science , volume=5 , issue=29 , pages=321-334 , url=https://zenodo.org/record/2136490 {{cite journal, doi=10.1002/andp.18300961010, title=Ueber einige Eigenschaften der vom Lichte auf das Gesichtsorgan hervorgebrachten Eindrücke , year=1830 , last1=Plateau , first1=J. , journal=Annalen der Physik und Chemie , volume=96 , issue=10 , pages=304-332 , bibcode=1830AnP....96..304P , url=https://zenodo.org/record/2392204 {{cite book, doi=10.1515/9783110422993-011, chapter=The Talbot-Plateau law of 1834/35 , title=Seeing Motion , year=2016 , pages=42-44 , isbn=9783110422993 Vision

See also

References