An old proverb states, “Dwell on the past and you may lose an eye, forget the past and you will lose both eyes.” As scientists and engineers, we may be tempted to adopt the opposite view. The validity of any scientific model does not depend on its history, but entirely on the accuracy with which it describes nature. Reading the original works of past generations is not a part of our upbringing, and if we pay homage to the giants of our discipline, we usually do this while we are already tinkering with or even contradicting their results.

Our times, increasingly characterized by specialization and fragmentation of knowledge, however, may rather profit from an occasional glance toward the past and the historical development of subjects of contemporary interest. In a very technical sense, this may help us to rediscover inventions that have been forgotten because technology was not yet ready. It may also help reduce the number of inadvertent rediscoveries that enter scientific journals as original insights. Perhaps even more importantly, understanding historic developments may help us keep an open mind regarding contemporary developments, may provide us with new perspectives on seemingly settled subjects, and may even facilitate the adoption of methods and concepts developed in another area for new applications. Tracing the history of a scientific development may also remind us of the role the human factor plays in science and engineering. Circumstances and personalities may not decide the validity of scientific results, but they have shaped undeniably the path from past to present.

The success of major developments in the natural sciences, and optics in particular, often relies on the availability and comprehensibility of paradigms, methodologies, and apparatus that different schools have adopted and employed previously. This applies somewhat to purely contemporary developments but is certainly more relevant to those originating in the past. In addition, it is possible to find many examples that indicate that a scientific approach that was successful in one area is highly likely to excel in another. Therefore, it appears important to provide an adequate arena for sharing such historically significant unifying threads, and for elaborating on relevant insights, analogies, etc., among the various optics-oriented schools around the globe.

In our opinion, JOSA A can serve as an excellent platform for accumulating and disseminating this body of historic information for the optical sciences. We are therefore pleased to introduce “retrospectives” as a new genre to serve this purpose.

While retrospectives will share many features with regular JOSA A contributions, including maintaining the quality of technical content expected for any submission, there are a number of differences. A retrospective is a historical overview of an area of optics or of an interdisciplinary area in which optical concepts are comprehensively employed. Our inaugural retrospective on methods to model the optical properties of glass-plate stacks by Simonot and Hébert [1] serves as a good illustration of an entirely optical development. Our second retrospective, by Garza-Soto et al. [2], discusses the close connection between two well-known papers on the discovery of the geometric phase. Other straightforward examples of interdisciplinary historical developments include the striking analogy between optics and mechanics (e.g., [3] and references therein), the co-evolution of optical microscopy and biological discovery [4], and optical methods employed in the fine arts over the centuries [5].

As a historical paper, a JOSA A retrospective must provide an overview of the development of theory, ideas, and experiments in a particular area and provide external context, e.g., geopolitical events. But unlike a purely historical review on optics, such as those often published in Optics & Photonics News, a JOSA A retrospective must include a heavy scientific component involving equations, scientific charts, figures, tables, etc., and not just an account of events. Furthermore, retrospectives must discuss how the historical developments of interest are relevant to today’s research. Indeed, some journals, for example, the European Physical Journal H, are also currently accepting purely scientifically oriented historical accounts, but they are scattered among all topics in physical sciences and, hence, their impact on optics is limited. In addition, JOSA A’s retrospectives will be primarily invited contributions, with unsolicited proposals being considered only as an exception. We therefore expect that retrospectives will be very clearly written and illustrated so that they can be of interest to a wider audience.

The official acceptance criteria for a retrospective are as follows:

Thus, we are pleased to launch this new paper type starting in April 2023. We hope it will serve optical scientists and engineers as an invaluable resource for a better understanding of their field.