Infrared radiation applications are present in many current technologies used in areas like veterinary medicine, geology, environmental monitoring, disease diagnoses and also military applications. However, the history about infrared discovery is not deeply analyzed and an opportunity is lost to explore conceptual and methodological aspects from the episode. In this research, we analyze the experiments of William Herschel (1800), who is considered the discoverer of infrared radiation. Herschel's original paper and the secondary sources about it seem to demonstrate that this finding includes a complex context with many inquiry problems.
William Herschel; infrared radiation; historical experiments
