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Wave interference: where does the energy go?
Last week was a relatively lousy one for me, but it was made up in part by getting a good question from a student on waves and interference after class. It's really nice to get a question that...
View ArticleMichelson and the President (1869)
I'm currently working my way through the book The Master of Light: a Biography of Albert A. Michelson (1973), written by one of his daughters, Dorothy Michelson Livingston. I typically find the...
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Singular Optics: Light chasing its own tail
(Title stolen shamelessly from my postdoctoral advisor, who I assume will forgive me.) As I've noted numerous times in previous posts, one of the fundamental properties that characterizes wave behavior...
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You could learn a lot from a ducky: the van Cittert-Zernike theorem
(Alternate titles considered for this post: Ducktoral degree, Send in the ducks, Proof by in-duck-tion, Duck Tales, Duck-ing the issue.) One of my specializations in optics is the theory of optical...
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Invisibility physics: Kerker's "invisible bodies"
(This is a continuation of my “history of invisibility physics” series of posts. The earlier posts are: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI) The history of invisibility physics truly...
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Freaks & geeks: optical freak waves in the laboratory
One of the most fruitful and intriguing avenues for developing novel scientific research is through cross-pollination with other fields of study. This is one of the reasons I'm proud of my excessively...
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The Discovery Place does optics!
This post involves a little bit of boasting! For the past month, the Discovery Place science museum in Charlotte has been displaying a small interactive optics exhibit targeted at 8-14 year-olds as...
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Optics basics: lasers!
One of my goals in blogging has been to run a series of posts covering the "basics" of optics, namely those concepts that form the basis of an understanding of the more advanced topics investigated by...
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Streets of the optical scientists!
This post is a repost of some proto-blogging I did on my department web page when I was a post-doc in Amsterdam. The web page is gone, now, so I thought I'd revise the essay significantly for the blog...
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Optics basics: surface plasmons
My goal in my "basics" series of posts is not just to introduce the most elementary topics in optical science, but also to give background on some of the more advanced concepts for future reference....
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