Idle Diffractions

An Update on The James Webb Space Telescope

T – 7.5 π x 10⁷

Last week found me at, among other things, the NASA SBIR conference on mirror manufacturing.  The main attraction being the last day visit to the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to see what can be seen of the integration and test of the mirrors and the instruments (NIRCAM, NIRSPEC, MIRI, and FGS).  There is encouraging news.  It does appear that most of the hardware now exists for both the telescope and the instruments.  Each of the instruments arrived at GSFC during this year and they are in some phase of initial testing.  GSFC is the facility where the thermal and vibration testing will occur as well as integration and testing. 

At the conference, Glatzel (yes, the son of the optical designer who inspired Juan Rayces optical design algorithm, found in Eikonal) reported that Tinsley (the L3/SSG version, not the ZYGO/ASML version) has delivered the last of the mirrors and yes, they are defining the state-of-the-art.  The numbers are not yet packaged for public dissemination, but, they are impressive. 

Now, what about that title?  I have no idea how many of you know that the number of seconds in a year is conveniently close to the number π x 10⁷ (365x24x60x60=31,536,000), something that was pointed out to me back in undergraduate days.  So, although it did “feel” like the JWST is moving out of the one challenge after another (which can be fun, but expensive) phase and into the relatively routine.  This probably not quite the case, but, the project does appear to have moved to an important to phase.  Below is a shot of one of the spare segments in a GSFC clean room (a really big one, as are most of the facilities at Goddard.

 

A spare segment from the JWST.

Following the center tour, Joe Howard, working with the host Phil Stahl and Peter Blake arranged for the group to see the “Science Sphere”.  This is pretty fun.  It is a suspended sphere, about 4-5 ft in diameter that forms for the screen for 4-6 projectors that are nicely integrated.  Perhaps most impressive, the projectors can be fed by real-time data.  There is the weather, including for example the worldwide weather in the summer of hurricanes, including, of course, Katrina.   But, the most compelling was to watch the air traffic world-wide, in real-time – fascinating (and then we had to catch the airplane).  One of the colorful earth resource images (somewhat fuzzy due to the lighting and motion) is below.  If you get near the GSFC visitor center, be sure to arrange to see The Sphere.

 

An image from “The Science Sphere” at the GSFC Visitor Center.

Faster, Smaller, (Higher), but, Maybe not Cheaper

Report from Laser Munich

I was at Laser Munich last week, again.  And, again, it seemed that Europe is continuing to emerge as a hotbed for optics.  Laser Munich makes other similar conferences in the U.S. look, to be generous, anemic.  I consider this good; it seems to be reinvigorating the field (at least for us classical optics types).  I only made it to half of the exhibits and 1/5 of the posters, but, in that I saw many things of interest.  As always, things seem to be going towards faster (femto is becoming atto), smaller (nano is almost a standard), and more complex (freeform is everywhere, even if we cannot measure it).

 

The Synopsys spread at Laser Munich.  There was a definitive “race for the top” (e.g. ceiling), which it appears that we won.  A nice touch came at the end of the day when some key vendors, including Melles Griot, conveniently next door, would bring in cases of German beer and one evening a vendor even brought bratwurst for dinner (perhaps unfortunately for them, I never figured out who the vendor was, unless it was the conference itself).

There were two major technical conferences of interest to me (this is where EOS, SPIE, and OSA all sponsor technical conferences).  The first was the EOS conference on Manufacturing of Components in combination with the SPIE conference on Metrology.  Here, some of the latest thinking in how to manufacture and measure (still unsolved) freeform surfaces was at the center of the discussion.

The other conference was, as was the case two years ago, the OSA/SPIE conference on OCT (optical coherence tomography).  This year was as excellent as the last, with one of the fastest overviews of 20 years of technology I’ve ever seen, presented by Prof. Drexler and an excellent tutorial by the founder of the field, Prof. Fujimoto.  To me, this is one of the most interesting cases of combining a shopping list of the courses that are taught in graduate school and from that emerges a technology.  It uses interferometry (white light Michelson), exotic sources (femto lasers, super continuum, super luminous diodes (I wonder what will be the adjective after “super”, ultra perhaps? – we’ll see), high resolution spectrometers, Fourier transforms, and a lot of tricks, developed over 20 years to create, recently, images of layers under the skin. 

While OCT is aimed at axial (1-D) resolution for application to the eye, OCM (optical coherence Microscopy) is directed at collecting images in 3D of cells under the skin.  The University of Rochester is the first to develop subcelluar 3D microscopy, biopsy level images in a configuration that can move to the clinic.  The latest image, acquired last week in the latest configuration, is shown below.  This technology has one of the fastest growth curves ever seen and demonstrates that exponential growth in technology is continuing to sprout up all around us. In optometry, the first clinical use was 2002, and since then it has grown to approaching 10 million procedures, at $48/each.  This would make a nice topic for Harvard Business Review.   One of the UofR recent images, which represents the state of the art, is included below, courtesy of Prof. Jannick Rolland, the Brian Thompson Chair Professor of Optical Engineering at the Institute of Optics.  These images are created through the application of optical engineering to advance complex ideas in science, an ongoing theme.

 

No scalpel was involved in acquiring these images of cellular structure under the skin.  Article currently posted in pending publication in Optics Letters.

SPIE Optifab is Here!

The Optifab conference is happening this week in Rochester (May 11 -13).  One of the highlights will be a panel discussion on the Q-type (Forbes) Polynomial Surface, which I am moderating in the Empire Hall from 2-3pm on Wednesday, May 12.

Two years ago was the first Optifab conference that I attended in Rochester.  The event of note that year, at least for me, was the attachment developed for the QED aspheric stitching interferometer (ASI), which was the motivation for the Forbes polynomial.  Note that in this informal setting, I am retaining the “Forbes” label on the polynomial; out in the optics community, there is a move away from this personalized reference to a new, yet-to-be-fully-adopted standard.  Synopsys has selected “Q-type” polynomials as the identifier in their recent, full release of the polynomial in CODE V.  (Along with the implementation of the polynomial, including painless converters to and from the power series representation, Tom Kuper has developed and implemented a guidance tool for CODE V called Asphere Expert, which indicates where to best place an asphere in an optical system.) 

The QED ASI attachment is a very clever solution for aspheric testing. It includes an adjustable refractive wedge that is a plano-concave lens, plus a matching convex-plano lens that provides a spherical seat in which the two components rotate to create a wedge.  On my list is to develop a nodal aberration description of how it works.

In the intervening two years, the Forbes polynomial has matured and entered the mainstream tool set.  However, as with everything new, the transition is slow.  The panel forum at Optifab is intended to motivate a discussion of where we are at this point in time.  There are stories from the street that, at least by the time they reach me, are positive to very positive.  At the same time, the Forbes polynomial implementation has, in the short view, increased the time per cycle in optimization.  However, I will argue that if one steps back to look at the time cycle of an entire project, the key metric – the time spent to achieve predicted as-built performance – is in fact reduced. My argument is based on a lengthy, very realistic study of a high NA lithography lens conducted by Bin Ma, PhD, in conjunction with Prof. Rolland at the University of Rochester. Even more significant, for a given set of technology driven minimum limits, designs incorporating Forbes polynomials are achieving new levels of performance, when the slope constraints are used during optimization.

A key result is shown here, for the first time in public.  The first chart provides the sensitivity to decenter of a 29-element lens with seven aspherics, created by Bin Ma based on a realistic optical design specification before the slope-constrained Forbes polynomial was available.  The second chart shows the result for a lens developed with the slope-constrained Forbes.  To achieve a factor of two and more improvement in this very mature technology is a compelling result.

Following the panel discussion, arrangements are being made to present and discuss the results of Bin Ma’s work at the Synopsys booth.

 

 

The sensitivity of a state-of-the-art 193nm high NA litho lens design developed a) without aspheric slope constraints and b) with Q(Forbes)-polynomials with slope constraints.  (Preliminary data provided by Prof. Jannick Rolland and Bin Ma, to be published)

The Earliest Days of the Optical Society of America

I had occasion to spend much of the week at OSA headquarters as a participant in Leadership Week, a pleasant event, where I was able to get ahold of Vol. 1‑3 of JOSA, which was in this case, bound into one volume covering January 1917 to the end of 1919.  The American OSA (as opposed to the British OSA) was formed, as were many optical groupings outside of Germany including Imperial College in London and Institute Optique in France in response to WWI.  In the U.S. it was 1929 when the Institute of Optics, in Rochester, where I am often found was formed.  The rapid realization that Germany “owned” the production of not only optical instruments, but optical glass itself was a rude awakening for both Britain and the US, which I have written some on earlier.  It parallels in some ways the current concern with rare earth metals, 95% of which come from one country.  This was in fact the topic of an invited talk by a representative from the Dept. of Energy at this week’s OSA Leadership conference, but this is not the topic (see also the Feb. 14th article on the reopening (maybe) of the Mountain Pass Mine in California in Forbes).  The point made at the talk is that the rare earth metals are not rare in the sense of being scarce, rather they are simply very diffuse and extracting them typically has significant environmental consequences.  This is combined with the problem that they are very often collocated with thorium, which is radioactive.  Net result, it is not that the resource is concentrated in one country, but rather that only one country has policies and economics that promote exploiting these resources.  It was noted that while the House passed subsidies for the Mountain Pass Mine, the Senate did not.  Returning however to the topic at hand, OSA.

 The founding members of the Optical Society in 1918 double as editors of JOSA and were:

      H. Kellner, associated with Bausch and Lomb, 609 St. Paul St., Rochester, NY

      J.A. Anderson, Mt. Wilson

      H.E. Ives, 1023 16^th St. Washington DC

      C.E.K. Mees, Kodak Park

      W.B. Lancaster, 522 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, an ophthalmic MD.

      F.E. Wright, 2134 Wyoming, Washington DC, a renaissance scientist affiliated with Carnegie

      F.K. Richtmyer, Dept. Physics, Cornell, NY

      P.G. Nutting, Westinghouse, Pittsburgh

      J.P.C. Southall, Columbia University, NY

 

Looking at Google Scholar for this list demonstrates that many of them are true renaissance scientists, perhaps a common breed in that day. A nice example is in the extracted (partial) short article by Richtmyer in Science in 1931.  Another area of published research from him involved UV radiation and flowers.

 

From Science, 1931 – using a Google Scholar link

J.A. Anderson is a little more difficult to locate due to the common last name, which overlaps a current particle physicist, but, Wikipedia provides an interesting entry for him,

John August Anderson (August 7, 1876 – December 2, 1959) was an American astronomer. He was born in Rollag, a small community in Clay County, Minnesota to the south of Hawley.

Anderson received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1907, and remained on the staff after graduation. In 1908 he became professor of astronomy at the university. In 1909 he was also given the responsibility for the Rowland ruling engines that were used for creating diffraction gratings, and the quality of these was considered excellent, especially the concave gratings. He was married to a woman named Maria.

In 1916 he left to work at the Mt. Wilson observatory. He remained on the Mt. Wilson staff until 1956. His most notable contribution was his adaptation of the Michelson's interferometer technique for measuring close double stars. He used a rotating mask at the focus to measure the separation of Capella.

From 1928 until 1948 he was Executive Officer of the Caltech Observatory Council, working on the instrument and optical design of the main Palomar Observatory telescope. During this period he collaborated closely with George E. Hale and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He died in Altadena, California. The crater Anderson on the Moon is named in his memory.

He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Howard N. Potts Medal in 1924.

Biographical Memoir

Unless otherwise noted, the following publications were by John A. Anderson.

• "On the Application of the Laws of Refraction in Interpreting Solar Phenomena", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 31, 1910.
• "A method of investigating the Stark effect for metals, with results for chromium", 1917.
• "The vacuum spark spectrum of calcium", 1924.
• "The Use of Long Focus Concave Gratings at Eclipses", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 38, 1926.
• J. A. Anderson and Russell W. Porter, "Ronchi's Method of Optical Testing", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 70, 1929.
• "Spectral energy-distribution of the high-current vacuum tube", 1932.
• "On the application of Michelson's interferometer method to the measurement of close double stars", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 51, June 1920.
• "Optics of the 200-inch Hale Telescope", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 60, 1948

 

P.G. Nutting was quite active in the 1920s in optics, but, 1930 finds this area of research for him,

DOI: 10.1306/3D932938-16B1-11D7-8645000102C1865D
Physical Analysis of Oil Sands
P. G. Nutting (2)
AAPG Bulletin
Volume 14 (1930)

Since the work on rock and grain densities by A. F. Melcher at the United States Geological Survey, described by him in 1920, various improvements and refinements have been introduced in the methods and apparatus used there. A new form of precision pycnometer and new methods are described, with a simple method of measuring permeability. Common sources of error and the interpretation of results are discussed in some detail.

He appears to have transitioned fields in about 1926.  In 1914 he published an interesting Royal Society article on axial chromatic aberration of the eye (I am in a hotel and do not have the University level access I often have so I cannot show this one)

H.E Ives went on to file a color television patent (I don’t know how relevant it became)

A color TV patent filed in 1931 by H.E. Ives

In 1919, all members are listed with their addresses, which are a mix of residence and business.  The address used by Kellner above appears many times and is probably a plant of Bausch of Lomb.  There are 115 members, including the above, with the Boston Optical Co., Hardy & Co., Illinois, and Pinkham and Smith representing the corporate membership.  There are a number of still familiar, and semi-familiar, but, nothing in the class of the then famous physicists of the time.  Some of the names that I recognize include the likes of Edward Bausch and Adolph Lomb, Henry Crew (wrote an excellent history book), Crittenden at BS (not yet NBS) who wrote on aberration theory as did T. Smith at the National Physical Lab in England, who is also listed.  As a digression, T. Smith is one of the most prolific authors of the period, particularly publishing in the coming years in JOSA, who had no specific lasting influence that I can see.  Fabry is there from France, as is Hale from Mt Wilson (perhaps to become the most famous of those on the list).  Among those who went on to form companies were Kollmorgen.  Most heavily represented is the Bureau of Standards with 15; Coblentz, Crittenden, Curtis, Fairchild (to found Fairchild Camera, recently purchased by BAE?), Foote, Gibson, Karrer, Meggers, Mohler, Peters, Priest, Schultz, Tool, Valasek, and Weaver. Other common companies included Bausch and Lomb, Spencer Optical, Kodak, Nela Park (GE), Corning, American Optical (only C.H. Kerr and Tillyer), Keuffel & Esser, Westinghouse,   Universities included Clark in MA, Cornell, MIT (Comstock), Northwestern, Yale, Ross State, PA, U. Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Harvard, Syracuse, and City College, NY,  Barring the unlikely event that one of the Professors or one of the PhDs was a woman, there were no women.  Under the likely assumption that all of the professors were PhDs, there were 67 of 112, versus today’s interesting figure that I picked up this week of 85% of over 16,000.  One of the more interesting members, whom I recently gave a talk on, is Saegmuller, who has a very interesting family-written life story on the Internet that I stumbled on last year.

Each of the first three volumes contains sponsorship pages form Kodak, American Optical (founded in 1833), Warner and Swassey, and Bausch and Lomb.  The initial issues lead with the byline “Devoted to Theoretical, Experimental, and Applied Optics”.  The first article, by Richtmyer, an editor and Prof. at Cornell says basically that the many the professors at the 500 universities and colleges in the US that are only teaching need to start also performing research.  He suggested that JOSA could contribute by compiling topics in need of research.  In the first three volumes there are a number of articles trying to explain vision and how rods and cones actually may work and on film and color.  By today’s standards, the articles border on simplistic.  In the 4^th article, the lead editor, Kellner (as in Kellner eyepiece, and also the nemesis of Saegmuller according to his life story) attempts to set up a set of symbol conventions for geometrical optics to as a solution to the problem already acknowledged that there is no standard for geometrical optics parameters.  In retrospect, he failed, we still have absolutely no standards other than perhaps f is focal length.  He also attempted a sign convention – which also failed.  Many of the issues have a section on patents, a theme that reappears in Applied Optics in the 60s. 

On p. 45 is a summary of the papers held at the first Annual Meeting in New York City on December 28, 1916.  The meeting was held under the auspices of the A.A.A.S., who held their annual meeting on New Year’s Day typically (see the earlier blog on galaxies and Hubble).  Paper topics included the design of specific four element lenses (typically), vision and the eye, and film; there were 13 in all, about ½ from society members and 4 from society founders.  Many of the talks appear later as articles in JOSA.

Near the end of issue 2 of volume 1 there is a ½ page on “Optics Abroad” where the opening of Imperial College in London and the Institute Optique in France under Fabry is noted.

Issue 3 brings an unexpected article on how to ray trace to determine intensity distribution for the light emitted by an automobile headlight by O. E. Conklin – this is possibly the first treatment of this subject.  It is nearly 20 pages and includes observations on the importance of a line filament.  Conklin was with the Scientific Bureau of Bausch and Lomb.  The last pages of Issue 3 provide a summary of a “Report of the Committee of Nomenclature and Standards of the IES”, which at least appears to in fact define many of the quantities and terminology that survives to today including radiance, irradiance, brightness, and 30 other terms including Lambert, Lumen, and Lux (see page 177-179 of Vol. 1).

Volume 2 opens with an article by Major F.E. Wright (founding member and editor) on the “War-Time Development of the Optical Industry”.  This covers opinions and facts that I have written on previously based on reading this material in another forum from that time.  It covers how the U.S. in particular scrambled to learn to manufacture glass and then field glasses over a 24 month period.   This is followed by an article by Kollmorgen on protecting silvered mirror.  At this time Kollmorgen was already involved in the manufacture of periscopes, their niche even today.  The problem was the German’s no longer provided the high index turning prisms and without those there was to be no periscope.  Kollmorgen set of to use front surface mirrors during the war and wrote of his work to develop a protecting coating, coming up with the idea of spinning the mirror while the protective lacquer layer dried.

Towards the end of issue 1 of vol. 2 one finds the Constitution of the OSA (p.46-47).  To be a member, one needed to be “Any person who has, in the opinion of the Council (or at least 2/3rds of it), contribute materially to the advancement of optics.”  At this point Adolph Lomb is treasurer.  While local societies are mentioned in the bylaws, none are listed.

Volume 3 opens with a method of testing lenses proposed by Jewell, which I have seen earlier in a collection of the research publications of Kodak’s research lab of the period (available for download on the ORA website via the link to Kirtas).  The concept was based in a radial line chart.  An very nice photographic illustration is found on p. 57.  This is followed by some useful data on old glass types and refractive index formula published by Nutting.  T. Smith appears for the first of what was to be many, many times in Vol. 3, proposing what may have been a first proposal of a testing method that has evolved to become modern day MTF testing.  The line pattern used today appears on page 78 of Vol. 3.  Volume 3 closes with P.V. Wells writing a short piece on “The Future of the Optical Industry in the USA”.  His points remain somewhat timeless.  After pointing out that humans rely on sight for some of their more precise input, he then noted that nonetheless, there was no significant market for instrumentation that advanced precision measurement using light.  As a result there are no economies of scale in manufacture and, to contribute to the field presents a need to overcome a substantial learning curve.  This is followed by a paragraph explaining why Germany excelled in-spite of the odds, pointing to a problem with overpopulation driving resource demand couple with the “genius of the Zeiss-Abbe (and I’ll add Schott) partnership”.  The author closes with a call for government funding for advanced research in optics, a call that continues to today.  Witness the upcoming call to revisit the government review of the industry held at the National Academy of Science, where  I spoke on the field of Optical Design back in 1996 and which resulted in the publication entitled “Harnessing Light” and perhaps more, but not that I could tell.

In all, the first three volumes are 345 pages, versus today’s page counts which exceed 20,000 per year for Optics Express alone.  It was a different time.

In closing, last week, the book collection of Rudolph Kingslake (or a portion thereof) returned to the Optics Institute at the University of Rochester and with it volumes 4-20 of JOSA where it will be moved to a display with controlled access.  My personal collection continues from there, so, I plan to continue this series from time to time going forward.

The New Frontier(s) - Part 3: Beijing, China

So, since we were in the area, otherwise known as in Asia, we went the following week to Beijing for SPIE’s Photonics Asia, which we also attended the last time it was held.  We were hosted, as before, by Prof. Wang and also by Prof. Son, who had recently been a visiting professor at the University of Rochester.  This is a somewhat interesting conference in that it is heavily attended by Chinese students, over 1,000, many of whom give talks on their research.  This provides a very interesting perspective on the state of optics research in China.  In the course of the conference, we did manage to almost get our fill of Peking duck (but not quite).

 

 

The Roast Duck Restaurant (chain) in Bejing.

One of the conference highlights was the plenary paper by “Willi” Urlich from Zeiss, who gave a nice, well-illustrated talk on the history of progress in lithography lenses.  As with the prior conference, the evening banquet was quite an affair, with quite an elaborate operatic showing during a nice dinner.

 

The SPIE Photonics Asia Dinner.

The final two days were spent visiting labs at the university and the Dali Lama temple, a site we had missed on the prior visit, while many of the “first-timers” to China, including Julie Bentley, did the big tour of the great wall and the other major sites.

Entering the Dali Lama Temple in Beijing.

 

More sites in China. On the left, Dr. Son, our colleague and guide.

On the final day, Dr. Son took us to an emerging artists quarter in Beijing.  This turned out to be very interesting and is highly recommended.  It is an area of about 8 square blocks with small shops displaying dominantly original art.  There is sculpture, painting, and on and on.  The work was very original and really quite inspiring, I thought.  While I will show some art in the moment, there was a large museum, with a number of lets call them large for mat pieces.  The most striking of which were the remainders of train, that was buried in a tunnel cave-in during an earthquake in 2007.  In honor of those who died, the artist and a number of dedicated volunteers extracted the train from the wreckage, and brought it to the museum – quite a sobering piece – very dramatic.  It is accompanied by a video of the extraction and transport, all with very primitive “tools”.

The train buried in a tunnel during an earthquake in 2007.

On the art side, there are many choices, one of which is shown below.  There were a number of these large outdoor sculpture displays.  This one was found in “Originality square.”  The gentleman gesturing was attempting somewhat emphatically to convey a message – I have no idea of what, however, as we were unaccompanied at that point.

 

A very dynamic sculpture – there were literally hundreds of wolves all around us – each individual – very impressive.  The gentleman in green was attempting to convey some important (to him at least) message to me – which was somewhat a pointless exercise, but interesting.

As we were leaving, I noted this somewhat customized mode of transportation – built in gloves – there are still many bicycles motorized and otherwise throughout the city.

 

 Local transportation – complete with built-in gloves.

On our return, the leaves had fallen, and the OSA annual meeting was off and running, with the notable event that Prof. Rolland (also known as my wife) was elected to the OSA Board of Directors.  I think that means more trips to come, although, October may (and perhaps hopefully was) our record for the most diverse single month we’ve encountered recently.

 

Late fall at the Institute of Optics.

 

 

An indication of travels to come in 2011.

The New Frontier(s) - Part 2: Seoul, South Korea

After Brazil, our next stop (after overnighting in Washington DC) was Seoul, South Korea for the ISMAR conference (AR/Augmented Reality).  This was a conference for which Prof. Rolland was the general chair in Orlando the prior year.  This is the group that is creating content for augmented reality, whenever anyone gets around to creating hardware to display it on.  This was our first trip to Seoul and we had an opportunity to supplement the expenses and stay in the Lotte Hotel – a worthwhile experience.  There is a lobby area that overlooks a waterfall and all in all, it was a very well-appointed place as can be noted from the lighting in the elevator.  Ever since I became involved in illumination design, I have learned, from those I hire, that the first test in an interview is does the candidate look up at the lights in the elevator – this is a good sign.

The elevator light in the Lotte Hotel, Seoul, South Korea.

At the conference, we presented a full-day tutorial on head worn displays that was well attended.  The exhibit was small, but, as it was last year, interesting.  Notable in their absence, there were no prototypes or other head worn displays this year, not a particularly good trend.  There was, however, a very inspiring display of how book reading, expecially for children, could rapidly become more engaging.   As shown below, there are now reading screens where as you turn the page of an underlying book, the “scene” that is being described in the book comes alive in an animated (short-looped clip) 3D.  I found it very inspiring.

Augmented Reality content underdevelopment to enhance children’s books.

The keynote speaker at the conference, Henry Fuchs, has led the field for decades now, and gave a number of talks.

 

Henry Fuchs – the keynote speaker at ISMAR 2010, Seoul, South Korea

The architecture at and around the conference center was quite dramatic, and Seoul in general made for an interesting visit.

Outside the ISMAR 2010 Conference Center

Since we were at an augmented information conference, it was interesting to note that our taxi driver, shown below, probably would have been a safer driver with a projective display, rather than using his cell phone for navigation (he was lost).

Taxi driver navigating by cell phone in Seoul – why we need a projective display, soon!

Before we leave, a few random shots from South Korea.

I don’t know – it just was calling me.

That was a really tall building – nice example of horizon lines – optics is everywhere.

A shot from the Forbidden City tour on the last day.

The New Frontier(s) - Part 1: Sao Paulo, Brazil

The month of October brought the OSA Annual Meeting to town, in Rochester, NY.  After spending the month at smaller optics conventions in Brazil, Korea, and China, there are some notes of potential interest.

The month opened with an invitation to the university in Campinas, Brazil, about an hour south of Sao Paulo. Prof. Rolland and I were invited to what was portrayed as an OSA lecturer event.

“Every year we have at our institute (Physics Institute, University of Campinas - UNICAMP, Brazil) a Young Researchers Meeting, with the objective of drawing together the graduate students of physics and related areas. This meeting is an initiative of the grad students of our institute and is completely supported by our graduate school and other agencies.

The OSA Student Chapter at UNICAMP will take care of the optical sections, so, we are inviting you to give a special lecture, based on the 20 years of the Hubble.

The meeting lasts for 3 days consisting of a series of short courses, oral sections, plenary talks, etc. In all these activities, the main idea is to explore themes of broad interest in physics and related areas.

Given the breath of your research interest and scientific output, we believe it would be very nice if you could come for our meeting this year.”

However, even then it did seem a bit odd, as there was a significant “Latin America” event involving the President of OSA, Jim Wyant, a week earlier and a few hours away, also in Brazil.  However, OSA agreed to pick the travel for Prof. Rolland and we were off, but not before hearing almost one too many stories regarding safety and Sao Paulo.  On arriving, we were met by a Portuguese-speaking driver to bring us the 1+hours from the airport.  The campus was large -- over 40,000 students -- with full-perimeter security.   The lab tour revealed two or three labs, one of which was developing a nice, compact, robust-for-alignment femto-second laser, good for optical coherence tomography. 

The next day we found that this was a student organization in the true sense of the word.  There was one ambitious student who had made the arrangements with us and he had a group of some 10 or 20 students that worked together.  The faculty was either uninformed of or ambivalent about the entire event, which was unfortunate as the student Felipe Santos had in fact done a good job of organizing speakers and sessions, which were sparsely attended with no faculty present.

 
Poster Session at the Student Optics Seminar in Campina, Brazil

 

IODC 2010

Announcing the launch of the Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Early Optics and Related Sciences

As I’m sure anyone who wanders over to read this knows, next week is the big week: IODC.  For me, perhaps the most exciting event that I know of in advance is that ORA is launching the Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Early Optics and Related Sciences, in partnership with Kirtas Technologies, a leader in book digitization. This partnership allows these rare, out-of-print books to be available for sale online at Kirtasbooks.com. This is a not-for-profit venture, with any and all proceeds going to adding to the collection.

Be sure to come by our booth for more details, and to get your own copy of Airy’s 1848 book, the Undulatory Theory of Light, one of over 150 rare titles in optics from my personal collection that are now readily available as e-books (~$2-3), soft cover (~$15), or hard cover (<$50 in almost all cases), depending on your budget.
 
Among the classics we have at Kirtasbooks.com is Coddington’s original work. A little later this month, Robert Smith’s Opticks will be available; this is, I believe, the first book on optical design in English (1728).

To access the Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Early Optics and Related Sciences, visit: http://www.kirtasbooks.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=59&Itemid=3

If/as you choose to read books from this collection, please consider submitting comments to this blog about what neat little tidbits you learned. Although I collected these books, in many cases I have not read them myself. I strongly recommend Dennis Taylor.

Also, if you have a pre-1921 book on your shelf that is on optics or optical design and is not on the list, and you would like to arrange to have it added to the collection, please contact me. 

Hope to see you there.  Do come immediately to get your book, as the on-site supply will be limited.

By the way, if you are a true fanatic, there will be a few copies of the 1906 Optics Convention that I had printed in the hard cover format to see how it comes out.  If you track me down at IODC, you might be able to talk me out of a copy. 

Instructions on how to reach the book site going forward will be found at www.opticalres.com

Observations from Society for Information Display (SID) 2010 Exhibition

Just a quick note about SID 2010.  The SID exhibition is a great place to see the TV you want in your living room or bedroom, in about five years.  This year did not disappoint.  The clear, out-and-out winner this year was the LG 84” 3-D Home Theater.  Coming on the heels of Avatar, this unit is stunning for its size, clarity, color saturation, and by far the best 3-D of the show in this size group -- at least that I saw. The other truly amazing unit was an LED TV, about 72 inch format, 3mm thick.  Very cool on the wall.  Often these units never make it to the consumer, but if the LG unit does, it just may find a place in my home.

The best talk at SID, I thought, was the plenary on the history of airplane cockpit design by a veteran Boeing designer (we were in Seattle after all), Mike Sinnett.  He had a photo of the first Boeing cockpit – a single seater, and then a photo series of great moments in airplane cockpits.  He made the interesting point that the parameters of interest are the number of people up front and the number of windows.  This peaked, as I recall, with five people in the front cabin: pilot, copilot, radioman, navigator, and manager. I believe it had seven windows.  The last transition was to convince the union that a move from three to two people, even in the biggest plane, is acceptable. 

A Boeing cockpit in the very near future (from Google Images, search “Boeing & cockpit”,
this particular image is posted at http://sarmtraining.com/images/b787%20dreamliner-cockpit-2.jpg)

With IODC upon us, this is a short entry, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to send accolades to the speaker.  And by the way, to see more interesting Boeing photos, try a Google images search on “Boeing & cockpit”.

The other interesting plenary was from a to-be-unnamed technology company.  A very well prepared marketing plenary tried to convince me that one of my hands is now destined to carry a cell phone that I will squint at for all sources of news and entertainment.  I refuse to believe this is the future of civilization.  This has reinforced my resolve to help bring see-through augmented vision displays to the world, maybe in less than 10 years.

Hope to see you are IODC.  Come up, say hello, get a book and the collected works of David Shafer, and let me know how to keep this little site interesting and relevant to you (or, just e-mail me).

A Second Important Collection: The Works of David Shafer

If you will be at the IODC in two weeks, note that ORA will be giving out flash drives containing a nearly complete collection of the papers and patents of David Shafer. For those who know David, his talks are very often outside of the box, bringing interesting and valuable observations forward. David always read his papers from a manuscript, which only a few people would manage to get a copy of.  As a result, while some of David’s papers found their way into OSA or SPIE publications, many did not.  For those that were published, OSA and SPIE have graciously agreed to this limited distribution of his works on the flash drive. Also, David filed over 100 patents, which also contain valuable insights into aberrations and optical design.  These patents are also collected on the drive. In all, there are over 200 papers/patents, including, as always, an interesting introductory note from David. Be sure to stop by ORA Engineering’s booth at IODC to pick up a flash drive, since quantities are limited. Following the conference, David will have any remaining drives, so you can contact him directly to inquire about availability.

An important event to be announced at IODC: The Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Optics and Related Sciences

The International Optics Design Conference
collocated with
The Conference on Optical Fabrication and Testing

June 10 – 14th, 2010
Jackson, Wyoming

Book cover design for selections from the Rolland-Thompson Collection of Antiquarian Books in Early Optics and the Related Sciences

It is almost upon us: the International Optical Design Conference (IODC), which I feel provides us a snapshot, every four years, of the state of “our” industry—optical design.  The modern revival of IODC began in either 1980 at Mills College, in the Bay area, or, as some may say (mostly those that were there) at a precursor conference in 1975 at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.  Since I entered the field in 1976, I missed the Haverford conference, although the founder of Optical Research Associates (ORA), Tom Harris, was there; I will share his insights on that event in a later posting. In 1998, I was the IODC co-chair with Leo Gardner, when the conference was located in Kona, HI.  The preconference site visit made for a particularly good “assignment” that year. 

Beyond a full contingent of papers, of which I and my wife, Prof. Jannick Rolland of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, are authors and/or coauthors of quite a few this time around, there are a couple of exciting events that I have been coordinating, with important and significant backing from ORA.  First, at IODC we will announce the Rolland-Thompson website for antiquarian books in optics, a project in cooperation with KirtasBooks (provider of book digitization and print-on-demand services) and ORA.  The mission of the site is to make printed copies available of rare and out-of-print optics and other science books, at a reasonable price.

As I described in an earlier posting, there was a period of some 10-15 years in the pre-Internet days when I was acquiring very to extremely old books in optics and optical design, one volume at a time, while I traveled throughout the US and England.  At the time, I was looking for Coddington’s original work, published in 1828.  Early on, I discovered that optics books that were very important to the fields of optical design and physics—such as Airy’s Undulatory Theory of Light (1848)--were languishing on crowded and dust-covered shelves in bookshops well off the beaten path, often at extremely reasonable prices.  My copy of Airy was purchased in the desert outside of Phoenix, in a bookshop of unpainted cement block, one door, and one window that was 99% filled with tattered paperback books. There at the back of the store was a single, three-foot shelf of hardcover books.  Imagine my surprise at finding on that shelf the only copy of Airy I have ever seen on the market. As I brought the copy to bookshop owner, he remarked that I was buying “the only book that brings any sense of respectability to this establishment.” He then rang up the charge of $8.50.  It is worth noting that although I did collect over 500 books in optics, physics, and astronomy written before 1930, I nearly never, in 15 years, saw a book twice, and I rarely found more than five books in any one place.

Returning to IODC: if you come early to visit ORA Engineering’s booth, we will have a complimentary copy of Airy’s book available for you to take away. Although some rare optics books are available online through Google scholar, having a printed copy on the shelf is, for some of us, still very attractive. At IODC, we will describe the process for ordering from a current list of over 125 volumes, dominantly in optical design. The current criterion is simply that the book is in the collection and it has an expired copyright, which means earlier than 1921, with some titles reaching back to the 1700s including works by Descartes and Euler.  The pricing system is very attractive, and any and all revenue will be used exclusively to expand the collection. A majority of the original books are now found on the first floor of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona, which generously agreed to house them when they outgrew the space at my home.  Now, through links that will be posted at Optical Research Associates, the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, the University of Rochester Institute of Optics, and KirtasBooks, in Victor, New York, the volumes will be accessible in a number of formats including electronic download, for a nominal fee of a few dollars, a print-on-demand soft-cover at an average price of about $15 (nothing over $25, I believe, with the potential exception of Robert Smith’s Optick’s, which may be the first book on optical design in (olde) English, 1728, and over 800 pages with many fold out prints, being processed at Kirtas this week and certainly one of the few truly expensive books in the collection), and even a print-on-demand hardcover with a somewhat higher (but still extremely reasonable) price structure. 

Looking forward, I will be reading a number of the books for the first time myself and writing up interesting discoveries. Also, shortly, the list of the books is expected in a condensed format to publish here, along with the web link.

Report from the OFC/NFOEC 2010 Plenary Session

(OK, today I’m distracted; see the origins of K-I-S-S at the bottom of this post.)

I attended the plenary session at OSA’s OFC/NFOEC conference in sunny San Diego this morning – I’m overlooking the harbor now.  It has been at least five and perhaps even seven years since I was last here at OFC.  As with most good plenary sessions, I came away with all sorts of trivia and even some perspective – where to begin?

I will save the distraction for a moment and see if I can fill out this post with facts of the past, present, and future as it relates to the rise of global and personal communications.  Some of the numbers are staggering.  I expect many readers were caught up in the frenzy of telecom and that many have not looked back since the crash.  My recollections are that we designed our first WDM (wavelength division multiplexer) for a government research center in 1997, based on a large glass prism.  Shortly thereafter, I found myself writing an 80-page proposal to the ATP program for a few million dollars to advance free-space optics modeling.  In spite of having nearly no idea what I was writing about, as this was the early days, and the fact that I wrote the proposal alone in a hotel over a 60-hour sleepless stretch (haven’t done that again), we won.  Following this, I had the clever idea that many people would be interested in glass prototype micro-optics, and so we bought an optics shop in the U.S. that made endoscopes.  With that, we were on the train.  I spent the next three years on the road (40 weeks a year) and yes, we even exhibited at OFC in 2001, I believe. Our engineering group saw our telecom design business grow from that first job in 1997 to 30% of our business at the time of the crash, in June 2001 as I recall.  Well, that was then.

In touring the remains of the industry at the show today, I was telling my colleague that it’s like the telecom giants woke up one morning, looked around, and stepped on all the ants that were swarming around them.  Today I heard three names consistently: Verizon, ATT (yes, they seem to be back), and Alcatel.  And apparently JDSU is hiring.  The displays are old and tired, there are a lot of empty spaces, and in general, I’d say the status quo prevailed into the end.

But here are some of the plenary numbers.  When ARPAnet was invented in 1963, it connected UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah.  In 1969, as I’m entering high school, the first DNS was assigned.  Today there are 500,000,000 of those (assuming DNS is a noun, I didn’t look up what it means). If that doesn’t work, that number is also attributed to the number of Internet nodes.  In 1980, as I exited graduate school, there were 0 mobile phones.  Today, there are 2,500,000,000 of those.  I heard in the hall today, or was it yesterday, FLICKR (a photo upload site?, don’t know, haven’t been there, yet) had its 1,000,000,000th transfer, at the same time the current run rate is 1,000,000,000/year. Now that’s a growth rate. I don’t think they get $0.01, but, if they did…. 

An interesting plot showed that in the early 60’s the world had 2.3 billion people, and if I understood the plot, a significant percentage of them lived in “developed” countries.  In 2013, there will still be about 2 billion people in the developed countries, and 6 billion in the developing countries.  The growth rate for the developed countries is flat. 

You’ve seen hockey stick growth projections.  But have you ever seen it actually occur? I may get the units wrong here – in 1993, the Internet appears to the average techie, defining the start of data flow.  By 2000, 6,200,000,000 GB of data is transferring per year, or per day/hour/minute/sec, not sure which.  (Note: GB already has 9 zeroes).  In 2011, we’re going to see a data rate of 1,800,000,000,000 GB.  Now that is a hockey stick.  Based on conservative projections, the data rate in 2020 will be in units of Petabits/sec (those come after Terabits, which come after Gigabits, or GB).  According to the third speaker in the plenary session, if we don’t rethink the architecture before 2020 (that’s in 10 years), it will require the entire output of a nuclear power plant (a really big number of Kw) to drive the routers needed, based on current technology. No wonder the word energy efficiency comes up.

I do recall when I last paid attention, the Holy Grail was 100Gbit data rates.  Many predicted it could not happen.  But the big announcement (OK, maybe just a big announcement) was that a 100Gbit routing would be brought online this year.  Apparently “coherent technology” has solved the challenge of transferring at these data rates without starting over.  So now they’re talking of 100Gbit routing to small companies before I retire, and to my home shortly thereafter.  So, what I think will be fun is reflected in a talk I heard in early 2000 by a telecom executive. He was having fun putting an early webcam on his dog, with a wireless unit, and then during the day turning it on to see where the doggie was.  His thinking was, eventually (which appears to be soon), you enter a GPS coordinate somewhere in the world, and you are routed to the nearest webcam from which you can view life, live – sounds neat.  I can imagine the end of travel, or will it be the beginning of armchair travel.  Once you have your immersive, full surround 3-D TV, you sign up for the trip down the Amazon consisting of a live feed to a surround of cameras on a boat outfitted for the purpose – could be interesting.

OK, before exceeding the space here on this blog post, the distraction I referred to earlier.  A speaker attributed the term Keep It Simple Stupid to one David S. Isenberg.  So, who could resist, I Googled (a term still not in my spell checker).  The answer is no, it was not him, but if you’re into telecom, you should check him out at www.isen.com.  You will find there, at least today, the following interesting graphic.

It turns out the right answer is Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, 40 years with the Lockheed Skunk Works – courtesy of Wikipedia.  Also worth a short visit if you’re a Skunk Works fan. 

If You're still at SPIE's Optics + Photonics: VISIT THE TELESCOPES - This Is Not To Be Missed

For those still at the show - be sure not to leave today before visiting the telescope collection.  This is not your pile of odd antiques - this is a professional collection of early telescopes, initiated by a classmate, Prof. John Greivenkamp. Supported by THE College of Optical Sciences (for the benefit of M.J. Soileau and those at the Fellow Lunch), the collection in the back of the exhibit hall is the largest collection of scientific telescopes from the mid-1700s currently on display anywhere in the world (yes, there are places with more telescopes, but, they are not on display (go figure).

The collection is very well commented and brings together a very diverse set of telescopes (and a few binoculars). These are truly rare pieces and this could prove to be the only time they are brought out onto the road like this. So, do skip that paper you have on your schedule - or that one last aisle in the exhibit area.

By the way, the poster on the astronomical telescopes of the past has scans of early woodcuts found in Smith's 1728 book Opticks, which I will cover in a later writing.  The poster was assembled by students at the University of Rochester under the direction of Prof. Jannick Rolland, who recently transferred to the University from CREOL (the College of Optics and Photonics, again for those at the Fellows lunch).

Hope this finds you in time.  If not, I will provide a Plan B, but not until you fail regarding plan A.