Idle Diffractions

HUGE Bird!

This is just in case you missed it.  Over the weekend, the project that created Perkin-Elmer’s government division (near as I can tell, I worked there from 1980-1985) and led, I would imagine to the demise of Itek, was revealed in Washington.  I had heard about the legends of “Big Bird”, the unclassified name for this program (for those that skipped this phase, many classified programs have unclassified names, they always have two words in them, so I’m told) for decades now.  But, I must say, this thing is startlingly large.  Phil Pressel, who has been leading the charge to declassify this mission, after CORONA’s declassification (Itek’s precursor to this) is someone I worked closely with at PE, on other programs.  Phil has written a book and it is in the final stages of being approved for publication.  You’ll be one of the first to know (and I’m counting on an autograph copy).  So, if you haven’t seen this, read on –

PS – regarding actually seeing it, given that this was a short notice, one-day event that we all missed, if you can get into NRO, go, it is there, under a large tent I hear.  If that doesn’t work for you (or me); next summer it is due to be unveiled for a 2-year run at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base museum in Dayton, OH.  OK, that is the only reason to go to Dayton, OH, but, I will be there and I’ll post something to perhaps encourage you to do the same.

http://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassified-nro.html

Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program

Roger Guillemette, SPACE.com Contributor

Date: 18 September 2011 Time: 09:03 AM ET

The massive KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite on display at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, after being declassified on Sept. 17, 2011. Longer than a school bus at 60 feet in length and weighing 30,000 pounds at launch, 20 KH-9 Hexagons were launched by the National Reconnaissance Office between 1971 and 1986. CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

 

CHANTILLY, Va. – Twenty-five years after their top-secret, Cold War-era missions ended, two clandestine American satellite programs were declassified Saturday (Sept. 17) with the unveiling of three of the United States' most closely guarded assets: the KH-7 GAMBIT, the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and the KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellites.

The vintage National Reconnaissance Office satellites were displayed to the public Saturday in a one-day-only exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va. The three spacecraft were the centerpiece of the NRO's invitation-only, 50th Anniversary Gala celebration held at the center last evening.

Secret satellites that reveal targets even in night is the claim of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - as evidenced by this NRO patch. CREDIT: NRO

Saturday's spysat unveiling was attended by a number of jubilant NRO veterans who developed and refined the classified spacecraft and its components for decades in secret, finally able to show their wives and families what they actually did 'at the office' for so many years. Both of the newly declassified satellite systems, GAMBIT and HEXAGON, followed the U.S. military's frontrunner spy satellite system CORONA, which was declassified in 1995. [See photos of the declassified U.S. spy satellites]

 

This National Reconnaissance Office released graphic depicts the huge HEXAGON spy satellite, a Cold War era surveillance craft that flew reconnaissance missions from 1971 to 1986. The bus-size satellites weighed 30,000 pounds and were 60 feet long.  CREDIT: NRO

Big spy satellites revealed

The KH-9 HEXAGON, often referred to by its popular nickname "Big Bird," lived up to its legendary expectations. As large as a school bus, the KH-9 HEXAGON carried 60 miles of high resolution photographic film for space surveillance missions. 

Military space historian Dwayne A. Day was exuberant after his first look at the KH-9 HEXAGON.

"This was some bad-ass technology," Day told SPACE.com. "The Russians didn't have anything like it."

Day, co-editor of "Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CoronaSpy Satellites," noted that "it took the Soviets on average five to 10 years to catch up during the Cold War, and in many cases they never really matched American capabilities."

Phil Pressel, designer of the HEXAGON's panoramic 'optical bar' imaging cameras, agreed with Day's assessment.

"This is still the most complicated system we've ever put into orbit …Period."

The HEXAGON's twin optical bar panoramic mirror cameras rotated as the swept back and forth as the satellite flew over Earth, a process that intelligence officials referred to as "mowing the lawn."

 

Phil Pressel, one of the developers of the KH-9 Hexagon's panoramic camera system, proudly points out some of the spacecraft's once highly-classified features, a life's work that he had been unable to discuss publicly until the NRO's Sept. 17, 2011 declassification of the massive spy satellite.
CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

Each 6-inch wide frame of HEXAGON film capturing a wide swath of terrain covering 370 nautical miles — the distance from Cincinnati to Washington — on each pass over the former Soviet Union and China. The satellites had a resolution of about 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to nearly 1 meter), according to the NRO. [10 Ways the Government Watches You]

According to documents released by the NRO, each HEXAGON satellite mission lasted about 124 days, with the satellite launching four film return capsules that could send its photos back to Earth. An aircraft would catch the return capsule in mid-air by snagging its parachute following the canister's re-entry.

In a fascinating footnote, the film bucket from the first KH-9 HEXAGON sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in spring 1972 after Air Force recovery aircraft failed to snag the bucket's parachute.

The film inside the protective bucket reported contained high resolution photographs of the Soviet Union's submarine bases and missile silos. In a daredevil feat of clandestine ingenuity, the U.S. Navy's Deep Submergence Vehicle Trieste II succeeded in grasping the bucket from a depth of 3 miles below the ocean.

Hubble vs. HEXAGON

Former International Space Station flight controller Rob Landis, now technical manager in the advanced projects office at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, drove more than three hours to see the veil lifted from these legendary spacecraft.

Landis, who also worked on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope program, noticed some distinct similarities between Hubble and the huge KH-9 HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite.

"I see a lot of Hubble heritage in this spacecraft, most notably in terms of spacecraft size," Landis said. "Once the space shuttle design was settled upon, the design of Hubble — at the time it was called the Large Space Telescope — was set upon. I can imagine that there may have been a convergence or confluence of the designs. The Hubble’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters [7.9 feet] in diameter and the spacecraft is 14 feet in diameter. Both vehicles (KH-9 and Hubble) would fit into the shuttle's cargo bay lengthwise, the KH-9 being longer than Hubble [60 feet]; both would also fit on a Titan-class launch vehicle."

The 'convergence or confluence' theory was confirmed later in the day by a former spacecraft designer, who declined to be named but is familiar with both programs, who confided unequivocally: "The space shuttle's payload bay was sized to accommodate the KH-9." 

[Infographic: NASA's Space Shuttle from Top to Bottom]

The NRO launched 20 KH-9 HEXAGON satellites from California's Vandenberg AFB from June 1971 to April 1986.

The HEXAGON's final launch in April 1986 — just months after the space shuttle Challenger explosion — also met with disaster as the spy satellite's Titan 34D booster erupted into a massive fireball just seconds after liftoff, crippling the NRO's orbital reconnaissance capabilities for many months.

   

A side view of a KH-7 GAMBIT spy satellite on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va., on Sept. 17, 2011.
CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

The spy satellite GAMBIT

Before the first HEXAGON spy satellite systems ever launched, the NRO's GAMBIT series of reconnaissance craft flew several space missions aimed at providing surveillance over specific targets around the world.

The  satellite program's initial system, GAMBIT 1, first launched in 1963 carrying a KH-7 camera system that included a "77-inch focal length camera for providing specific information on scientific and technical capabilities that threatened the nation," according to an NRO description. A second GAMBIT satellite system, which first launched aboard GAMBIT 3 in 1966, included a175-inch focal length camera. [Related:Anatomy of a Spy Satellite]

 

The GAMBIT 1 series satellite has a resolution similar to the HEXAGON series, about 2 to 3 feet, but the follow-up GAMBIT 3 system had an improved resolution of better than 2 feet, NRO documents reveal.

The GAMBIT satellite program was active from July 1963 to April 1984. Both satellites were huge and launched out of Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The satellite series' initial version was 15 feet (4.5 m) long and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide, and weighed about 1,154 pounds (523 kilograms). The GAMBIT 3 satellite was the same width but longer, stretching nearly 29 feet (9 m) long, not counting its Agena D rocket upper stage. It weighed about 4,130 pounds (1,873 kg).

Unlike the follow-up HEXAGON satellites, the GAMBIT series were designed for extremely short missions.

The GAMBIT 1 craft had an average mission life of about 6 1/2 days. A total of 38 missions were launched, though 10 of them were deemed failures, according to NRO documents.

The GAMBIT 3 series satellites had missions that averaged about 31 days. In all, 54 of the satellites were launched, with four failures recorded.

Like the CORONA and HEXAGON programs, the GAMBIT series of satellites returned their film to Earth in re-entry capsules that were then snatched up by recovery aircraft. GAMBIT 1 carried about 3,000 feet (914 meters) of film, while GAMBIT 3 was packed with 12,241 feet (3,731 meters) of film, NRO records show.

The behemoth HEXAGON was launched with 60 miles (320,000 feet) of film!

This image shows the flight profile for the NRO's GAMBIT 3 spy satellite missions between 1966 and 1984. The program was declassified in Sept. 2011. CREDIT: NRO

 

HEXAGON and GAMBIT 3 team up

During a media briefing, NRO officials confirmed to SPACE.com that the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and KH-9 HEXAGON were later operated in tandem, teaming-up to photograph areas of military significance in both the former Soviet Union and China.

The KH-9 would image a wide swath of terrain, later scrutinized by imagery analysts on the ground for so-called ‘targets of opportunity.' Once these potential targets were identified, a KH-8 would then be maneuvered to photograph the location in much higher resolution.

"During the era of these satellites — the GAMBIT and the HEXAGON — there was a Director of Central Intelligence committee known as the 'Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation' that was responsible for that type of planning," confirmed the NRO's Robert McDonald, Director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.

NASA's Rob Landis was both blunt and philosophical in his emotions over the declassification of the GAMBIT and HEXAGON programs.

"You have to give credit to leaders like President Eisenhower who had the vision to initiatereconnaissance spacecraft, beginning with the CORONA and Discoverer programs," Landis said. "He was of the generation who wanted no more surprises, no more Pearl Harbors." 

"Frankly, I think that GAMBIT and HEXAGON helped prevent World War III."

Editor's note: This story was updated on Sept. 19 to correct the name of Phil Pressel, who designed the HEXAGON spy satellite camera system.

Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Are We Learning From Our Mistakes?

As we approach 20 years of the Hubble Space Telescope, the subject of why it broke and how it was fixed continues as a favorite topic on the lecture circuit.  Recently, I was invited to a panel discussion with the broad topic of quality in engineering – in this case software, at DVCon in San Jose.  The audience of a few hundred was there to discuss methods for identifying and maintaining software quality.  When I was invited, I pointed out I know none of the industry acronyms, but, the organizers were undeterred.  Joining me on the panel were a series of what I would call working Vice President’s, meaning they rose up through the ranks as an engineer, as I have.  This made for an excellent mix and perspective relative to the interests of the audience, which from my vantage point appeared to be those with 5-10 years in the “working” world. 

The event was entirely unscripted, other than the moderator having a backup set of prompting questions initially to get the audience engaged and later to step up the pace should audience interest start to lag.  Now, I am not historically a fan of panels and rarely attend a panel discussion format event.  To mention an exception, the yearly Emerging Technology panel at MIT has consistently brought together the best of the best in a forum where they speak candidly on topics that are relevant.  I highly recommend this event.

Now, it seems that between the five of us on the panel, plus the moderator, we established a synergy that emulates the standards I experienced with the MIT panel and a rapport with the audience that encouraged and achieved a true group event.  The audience engaged quickly and asked challenging questions, to which the moderator orchestrated our responses to keep them terse, relevant, and engaging.  The questions represented their real challenges in understanding their real environment.  What was rewarding was, it did seem that we at the front really had “been there and done that” and could offer the questionee a perspective that did cause them, as well as many in the audience, to pause and move ahead in their understanding of the environment that surrounds them on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

I was encouraged to use the Hubble 1^st Servicing Mission story (never to be called a “repair” mission) as a context for any comments I might be inclined to make.  As a result, I established early on the evolving theme, which I initiated at the University of Rochester two years ago and at SPIE Annual last summer,  that the days of engineering of any flavor in the ideal world needs to be put away.  Working engineers, especially the evolving generation, need to think and act defensively.  Specifically, while your contribution will of course be perfect, the environment which your contribution will be placed in will be flawed in a many, many ways.  The Hubble primary mirror being an excellent case history, but it is one of so many, that I have to conclude this is a pervasive flaw in our model of the world of engineering as a whole. 

Of course, hindsight, as “they” are known to say, “is 20-20”.  (A digression – if you are an American born and raised engineer, working in America, it is worth realizing that many, if not most of these colloquial  expressions are truly meaningless and quite disorienting to the majority of the audience, who are not in the category described above).  So, rather than dwelling on the mistakes of the past, what can be applied to the future.  In my case, I have directly managed, (usually 1:1 with another PhD in my field and on my staff) over 2,000 projects for over 500 companies.  In addition, I was on the Hubble repair team (but by luck, not the Hubble “breaking” team) and I have in my background other experiences that are even more expensive than the Hubble repair.  From this I of taken the following insights into being a substantial contributor in complex technical environments. 

First, of course, you do all of the basics, obsessively. 

A)     You communicate the parameters that govern the problem you are working on (Table 1 in optical design/engineering speak) in writing, with every external communication.

B)    You determine your assumptions, ESPECIALLY in today’s science, your most basic assumptions.  Does 2+2=4 (not necessarily).

C)    You find two independent ways to check a calculation, preferably with completely different tools

But, and here is what is new, you do not have the luxury to do everything twice (and we are assuming the business model is not the one where it was recognized that repairing a failure, even one you caused, can be a valid source of substantial revenue). 

Where do you focus your attention?

You focus on what is the project doing for the first time.  A consistent failure path is where the new aspect of the project changes an assumption that has held for all time, until the day the project starts, and, you did not “think” about.  I have example after example after example after example … (you probably get the point). 

I give a one hour lecture with some of these examples, and, perhaps I’ll bring some to this to blog space, in the future.

In the meantime, I hear they have posted the entire panel discussion on the Internet, not that I have checked it out.

http://dvcon.org/2011_Panel_Session

I am more than happy to propagate this conversation, should anyone have insights or great stories to add.  Also, if you have a local society or other forum, and this sounds like an interesting talk, I enjoy speaking on this topic, and I seem to be somewhat global these days.

Local Cultures and the Internet

(No optics in this one, but, you still might enjoy it)

Traveling, especially abroad always brings new perspectives on the world.  I knew I was in trouble when on my first trip out of North America I failed at my first mission; get coffee.  Now, you’d think, traveling to New Zealand would not present a communication challenge.  But, literally the first thing I tried to do, failed.  There was a counter, with assorted pastries and behind it, coffee!  How hard could this be, even after a 14 hour flight?  The person behind the counter was not the problem.  I stared intently at the target, coffee, and said, “I’d like a coffee to go”.  She stared back, a little less intently, but, initiated no action.  Come on, I’m still in the airport, those were English words, weren’t they?  Hmmm, try again, “I’d like a coffee to go”.  Nothing.  Try pointing and gesturing – try frantically – no response.  OK, step back; watch how the natives do it.  What is the culturally proper phrase?  “I’d like coffee to take away”.  Immediate delivery.  Ever since I’ve figured it was hopeless to travel to a country that is not some version of English based.  Even if you do manage a few phrases of the language, you do not know the culture.

So, what brought this on today?  We’ll, we’re in Europe, France, with a native speaker (good thing).  But, this morning, a phrase comes across in the e-mail referring to blarney, a somewhat arcane phrase, but I believe fairly ubiquitous in the US, but, apparently not in France.   But, now we have the Internet.  Not only do you get the definition of blarney, a few contexts to use it in, but, you get the story of Cormac MacDermot McCarthy a castle owner in the 16^th century who acquired this reputation for talking his way through things (like how not to have your castle co-opted by the resident monarch).  How cool is that, and I didn’t even need 3D.  The website is built to attract tourists to Ireland, big business.  Hence, a pretty unique website.  Check it out. 

http://www.irelandseye.com/blarney/blarney.shtm

We did spend 10 weeks working from the University of Galway 2 summers ago invited by the now OSA president, Prof. Chris Dainty (OK, I snuck optics in).  Learned some culture – mussels are best eaten with significant amounts of Guinness.  But, that would be another story. 

Back to the point.  It is impressive how rapidly the Internet has become populate with things like the above.  It is increasingly valuable, as the local environment globalizes, particularly the US universities.  Our son is spending the summer in South Korea.  Why?  He thought it would be good to learn Korean – figured 3-weeks would do it.  It is a new generation.  So while he will learn something of one culture first hand, there are many more to go and until he can get there, there is the Internet.

Reconsider the world, without mice

I am continuing an interaction with a research group that works in virtual reality and augmented reality this week. Some 5 years ago, I was working with Jim McGuire to make the world’s first pair of seethrough augmented reality displays, seen below. They were quite nice, I thought. Clearly, after peddling them around the world for 3 years, what do I know? They are now on a shelf with a long line of nice prototypes, at the ODALab at the University of Rochester. But, we digress. 

 

A very nice ophthalmic quality seethrough display – very nice, on the shelf awaiting the next generation to displace it.

On the positive side, I saw a very inspiring research project this week in France at the University of Bordeaux 3, (or was it 4) aimed at our work environment in optical design, which led to the following. Prof. Rolland, who is traveling with me, pointed out that there are people who think about fundamental things like, what would the world be like if the mouse/touch pad technology had failed, for whatever reason. In her case, they were thinking about this at the University of North Carolina in the 90s, and here in France, they are still thinking about it.

I have noticed, off and on, that the environment for interaction seems to be shrinking. Ever since we replaced our continuous roll Calcomp plotter (who remembers those), I have been bothered. We still use the Calcomp plot driver as the basis for plotting. But, why would we abandon an interface that is limited in 1-dimension for one that is limited in 2-dimensions (single sheet printers). I’m the guy who in the dying days of Calcomp bought a 48”x continuous plotter – how cool was that (no one would walk down the hall to get the output)? I was told it was so much more convenient with a 2-D constraint, it fit on your desktop. This is a reason? So, continuing the trends, now I spend my day staring at a 10-14” space interacting with a key board and a touch pad. Now, touch pads are pretty amazing things, but, why is the space shrinking like this? Whoever stood around a drafting board developing new concepts? If you’re under 40, you probably have never seen a drafting table.

So, at least some people seem to have noticed this problem and they are bringing back the large format environment. In fact, I think I’ll go invest in drafting board companies, if any are left. I’m definitely looking for a drafting board when I get back – I think the last time I saw one was 10 years ago as it was wheeled out of the office, took too much space in the assigned 88 sq. ft. This whole push to lean and mean has left us just that lean on input and cranky (or is that from a different source).

So, what is new is Kinect; a device that can sit on a drafting board or other substantial work space (think 36” x 48” replacing 10” x 14”) and track your hands and your fingers for $100. It can learn (OK, be taught, hence the research project) how you want to interact with the workspace. You are no longer continuing to be squeezed into a more efficient space. You are moving back to higher bandwidth of visual data input, but, this I consider good. Why compute all this information and never even see it? When combined with a projector above the table ($1,000 and a camera $100), now you have a new space, with space. We have all this computing power creating data and we continue to shrink the space that the output is being reported to so that our office can be smaller, it’s madness. Remember the 10”x14” space? I decided to measure, it’s actually 8”x13”. What is it after the icons and tool bars and navigators that are hiding all the screens I would like to be seeing real-time? I just measured my CODE V command mode active area, 6”x10”. And I want at least 8 graphics windows in that space to make sure I am always trying to see the text underneath (now, to the credit of Dave Hasenauer, at least we have the TOW options that tabs the windows). It is out of control. Time for a reset.

So, watch for updates – this could get interesting again, I hope. Or, it could follow the glasses, to the prototype history shelf.

Will the future be in 3D?

I’m in at the University Bordeaux this week learning about their research in virtual and augmented reality, where I was invited to ArcheoVision.  This is a museum of archeology that is experimenting with the use of virtual reality combined with robotic replication based on high technology laser scanning to creative an environment that will attract, educate, and entertain the public without compromising the science of archeology, including monster (15 foot) reproduction marble statues (very cool – you can even order your own - $30,000).  They also offer to scan your head in 3D and make an accurate marble bust, for, you know what, only $2,999 (actually very cool too, we’re considering it).

We met with Prof. Robert Vernieux, an archeologist’s archeologist who spent nearly 15 years in Egypt.  He is now involved in many things, one being creating 3-D environments for the general public.  There are a few paths.  In one case, they have created a 3-D image file of ancient objects, which are then projected in a small theater environment, with some reasonable quality projectors.  In this way, otherwise small perhaps nondescript objects can become a center of attention.  Rather than lying up on the screen, 15 feet away, the 3D projection can effectively place it in your hand as a sharp, clear, fascinating image.  When combined with the lecture that places the piece in context, for a scientist at least, it definitely keeps you awake.  The second series we saw was a projection of antique amateur stereo postcards.  What has happened is Prof. Vernieux came upon a collection at a market in Egypt and brought them back to France where they are scanned and interfaced to the auditorium projectors.  Again for me at least, these were fascinating and I think I could have easily watched them for an hour.  Based on the success of the stereo postcards he found, from 1868 and 1903, of ruins in Egypt being excavated by archeologists, the center has advertised that they are accepting donations of stereo postcards from Egypt.  They have been sent thousands that they are now scanning.   But, the public is not coming in droves.  The place is rather quiet.

Now, to the point.  A group of scientists then gathered for a few hours to discuss whether 3D is viable.  It is not clear.  It is currently a technology that is extremely data intensive and often overwhelmingly time consuming.  The consensus is the 3D technology is currently somewhat of a toy, that pretty much everyone enjoys, for about 10 minutes, and then they say, “is that all there is?”, the answer often being – yes. 

An interesting observation, after designing a 3D “Cave” experience for the museum; everyone remembers the Cave, the delivery of the 3D technology, and no one remembers the archeology. This is not the goal.

So, as always, this is just a random musing, but, it will be interesting to see if 3-D becomes a standard technology in the next decade, or, goes the way of the laser disc player (which I happened to inherit with the house I recently bought – I have a great player, but, no discs – may have to do something about that).

Should you speak French (I don’t), you might enjoy,

http://archeovision.u-bordeaux3.fr/

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.

P.P. Ewald?

I happened to need to learn something about X-Ray diffraction the other day and this led me to one of the unheralded (at least in my circles), P.P. Ewald.  Prof. Ewald, based on a semibiographical book on him and his accomplishments edited by D.W.J. Cruickshank, P.P. Ewald and his Dynamical Theory of X-ray Diffraction should be a household name in physics it would seem.  He was a student of Sommerfeld and is commonly associated with the likes of Hans Bethe in addition to living to 97 and clearly was well liked by his colleagues.  All of these features lead me wonder why, for example, I know of Bragg so well, but know nothing of Ewald who in many ways appears to have brought the graphical, mathematical conceptual context to a field of science that has generated more than 10 Nobel prize winners and was the foundation of key work by a cast of hundreds, including the likes of Bragg, Brillouin, deBroglie, von Laue, Lorentz, and many more of the household names of physics in the early 20^th century. 

The reason may be that only the names above and others in that league were able to comprehend and then leverage his work.  At least based on the book, which I would expect is a remembrance of the good times and glorification of the bad, Ewald was nothing short of a visionary.  He was one of the rare, like Feynman, who thought graphically.  It is clear that mathematics, no matter how complex became parametric plots in his world.  His first contribution was, as is sometimes the case, truly revolutionary.  It was a graphical view, in 1912, of a physical process that even today eludes us, birefringence.  His classic figure is below.  And, no, I cannot really explain it, yet.    I do know that even now, optical ray trace codes cannot directly handle the analysis of a birefringent material in all its aspects, including for example polarization.  Yet, Ewald, before X-rays were even discovered, was developing a fundamental graphical view of what they would do when they were discovered. 

I am continually amazed by the period from 1885-1930.  It was a time like no other in science.  With the recent accessibility to the original material of this time, it is becoming increasingly valuable to research the original works.  As much for what they say, in a simpler time, as for an understanding of how they were thinking.  Although much earlier, last week I was able to add the works of Thomas Young (yes the double slit experiment) to my library.  Written in 1807, one can only be amazed at how much original science he both conducted, but, simultaneously published.  In reading of Ewald, one struck by how the struggle of everyday life for him and his family is lost in the triumph of the science.  The most striking for me is the photo below. AFTER, completing his PhD that anticipates the science of X-rays, and after the discovery of X-rays, a photo from the book shows Ewald at the reins of a four horse power (literally) carriage, which was a “portable” X-ray machine as he embarked for the Russian front.  It is very difficult to realize that the same calm professor in pictures from the 1970s is the same person as the one driving off to THE war.

Figures from P.P. Ewald and his Dynamical Theory of X-ray Diffraction, Ed. D.W.J. Cruickshank, H.J. Juretschke, and N. Kato, Oxford Science Publications and The International Union of Crystallography, 1992

 

A Look at Vulnerability

The latest issue of the online e-news letter, Electronic Design News

EDN.com link to article

has an outstanding article on how one individual contributor can compromise a complex operation; a topic that is rising in visibility.  This was a topic for the recent panel discussion at DV-CON and will be a topic at the upcoming DAC conference in San Diego, where I am speaking at a Monday evening event, sponsored by Synopsys.

I have not followed or had an interest in hacking, or security, or the Sony problem, but, it has had enough press that I did click on the link when it appeared this morning.  The article is interesting as a look inside of the science of hacking, but, it elevated to a Blog topic when I came to the “lessons learned” paragraph, which is an excellent statement of the theme of some of my own latest talks.

To pique you interest enough to go to the article by Mike Borza, I have extracted the lessons learned.  If you go to the article via the link, you will find the rest of the story, which I recommend if you have an addition 3-4 minutes (it’s worth it, really). 

The following is extracted from the link above, written by

Author Information

Mike Borza is founder and chief technology officer of embedded security specialist Elliptic Technologies Inc. He was also a founder and chief technology officer of network security appliances company Startle Networks. At Chrysalis-ITS (now Safenet), he worked with customers of the Luna series of network security processors as director of applications engineering. Earlier in his career, he was involved in biometric identity management systems design, safety-critical systems engineering, and optoelectronics design and manufacturing. Borza was a founding director of business networking forum The Ottawa Network. He has been an active contributor to the Security Task Group of IEEE 802.1 and was an editor of the 802.1AR Secure Device Identifier standard

“Lessons learned”

“What teachings can come from the PS3 hack? Certainly, many detailed issues allowed the attackers to peel successive layers off the PS3 security onion; these are important in their own right. But the bigger issue is that systems' security architecture and design are frequently undertaken at the very end of development, sometimes as an afterthought and sometimes simply resulting from scheduling issues, as the development of primary system functionality moves toward the product release date. This reality leaves security system development insufficiently resourced and reviewed, in the context of the value it is intended to protect for the whole system. This decision is a mistake. If a system is worth protecting, it is worth protecting well. Some ideas to consider:

• Protect those things that need protection. This statement is not meant to be trite; identification of the assets to be protected is an important first step in developing a plan to protect them. From the outset, the PS3 was marketed as much more than a game console; part of what was sold to people was the ability to run another operating system. This decision required a security subsystem that met the needs of the gaming and media ecosystems, restricting access to content and services when the PS3 was running its factory OS. Limiting protection to this objective likely would have been much easier to achieve than retroactively trying to limit what versions of system code could run on the platform. In effect, the security objectives were changed after the fact to protect against what in reality was a non-threat. The result was an attack that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations.
• Be realistic in assessing the threats you face. The more interesting or valuable your platform or the market for it, the greater the interest will be in trying to compromise it. This reality may translate into large-scale efforts to break the security system. Ensure that security analysis and subsequent design receive a level of attention in proportion to the value of the information you are trying to protect. And don't underestimate the level of effort that an eventual attack may bring.
• Plan for failure. This statement sounds defeatist, but it's not. If your system is valuable enough to attract a serious attack, your adversary may discover a vulnerability that enables a break for a period of time. Allowing for the possibility that you may need to repair and upgrade the security system over time is prudent planning. Designing in controlled amounts of flexibility to allow for changes that may need to be made later is a good future-proofing strategy, provided that it is carefully implemented. In retrospect, the misuse of a shallow signing key hierarchy that divulged the root signing key on the PS3 was a bad idea. Using it in a way that it could not be replaced was an even worse idea.
• Know what you know, and know what you don't know. Many products use their security systems to protect valuable assets, which are generally unrelated to security. The PS3 is fundamentally a special-purpose multimedia entertainment system (and a very good one at that), which has been at the center of a much larger ecosystem of content and programming suppliers. The security system was supposed to protect that ecosystem, but an apparent lack of competence in its design and implementation left it vulnerable and ultimately surmounted. Designing security systems is a specialized undertaking, and many companies do not have the necessary in-house expertise. In such situations, it is well worth engaging a security specialist to help with this particular task. If the same care and thought had gone into the PS3's security system as went into the consumer features, the console likely would not have been breached so completely. Independent scrutiny and review by experts may have helped avoid this outcome. “

It is important, better yet essential; to take these bullet headers and apply them to any project you are involved in.  From my experience my message has been bullet point #3, “plan for failure”.  If you make it to the Synopsys session at DAC, you can hear more on this philosophy and strategy, in the context of the Hubble Space Telescope, along with some inspiring pictures from the universe.

Double Jeopardy? 50 Years After “Lens Design with Large Computers”

In 1966, a forum was held at the University of Rochester titled “Lens Design with Large Computers”, following on the heels of a less formal, and less documented, event in a similar vein in 1964.  Ten years later, I found myself at my first summer job in the optical design department of Perkin-Elmer (where I helped with the tolerance sensitivity analysis for the Space Telescope, Fine Guidance Sensor and test setups for AXAF (what becomes Chandra, in 25 years), little knowing it would not be relevant for a full 20 years), working with authors of some of those 1966 papers.

This is brought to mind by the IBM event of the decade, the Jeopardy Show.  When Big Blue took the chess title in the first challenge, it was immediately obvious that yes, this would affect me directly.  Why?  There are many parallels between chess and optical design.  Sure enough, within 5 years, the global optimizer in CODE V, which was merely a concept for debate at the 1994 IODC conference, was challenging the best designers.  In fact, 2003 was the last time anyone on my staff claimed they were better. 

So, what does the Jeopardy Show mean for lens design?  At dinner with a chaired professor in the interaction of humans with machines recently, he threw out the following disturbing observation.  What is going to happen when the computer becomes the expert, who will teach the computer new things?  Under the assumption that those currently espousing that the field of lens design is no longer necessary, with computational focal planes will only commandeer 60-80% of the application space, who will be teaching who in 30 years. 

Looking at the history, as was written earlier, optics is often found at the leading edge of technology.  James Baker represents the first, and some might say one of the best examples of a lens designer developing a computer-aided optical design environment.  He, along with Robert Hopkins, also a ardent designer, independently led the emergence of computer-aided optical design from 1945 – 1955.  By 1955 there is a mix of mathematicians, like Donald Feder at Kodak and optical designers, such as the founder of ORA, Tom Harris, working to move the software on many fronts, but primarily optimization running up to the 1968 conference.  If we look at the 1968 authors, listed in Table 1, we see the lens design community is the dominant source of papers.

Speaking from the American history alone, from 1970 to about 1990 there were a few smaller companies, including Scientific Calculations (ACCOSV), ORA (CODE V), David Gray (Cool/GENIE?), Doug Sinclair (OSLO), and a few other independents developing optical design codes to support their optical design consulting.  More prominent in this period were the codes under development at major aerospace companies led prominently by what was then Hughes/El Segundo and LMSC Palo Alto Research and the specialty reconnaissance companies like ITEK and Perkin-Elmer.  Beginning in 1980, I was at Perkin-Elmer, where I spent my evenings, for two years, learning the 200-300,000 lines of code and beginning to expand its capabilities to include, for example, circular gratings in support of AXAF.  In this period, pretty much across the board, lens designers were driving the developments.  However, by the late 70’s, things started to evolve (or devolve depending on your perspective) as the accountants started to realize what it was costing to maintain the code, typically $2-$3M per year and companies like ORA were offering a comparable, or often better product for a mere $1000/month, (per designer).  By the mid-80s, I had moved to ORA, seeing the end of software support at Perkin-Elmer, but, notably where I was presented with in retrospect, a historically significant choice, join the software “department”, OR join the optical design group.  Having no formal training in software, I went with the design group. 

So how does this all relate to Jeopardy?  The thought question is, as computer become more and more expert at, for example lens design, the number of experts in optical design will, by necessity (read economic pressures) decline.  Could this number approach zero in 20-30 years?  And if so, where are we?  Will computers intelligence rise to not only make the execution of code something only “they” can do, but, also find paths to new ways to solve problems or adapt to the evolving technology?  And, if they do not, who will be left to teach them?

Recall the events of WWI, when the British and the Americans both woke up one morning to realize the had fewer than 5 optical designers in the entire country and worse yet, even if they could execute a binocular design they had forgotten how to make glass.  It does seem déjà vu may be on our horizon.

Click on images below to enlarge.

 

                           

                   

    

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.

Mathematics and Science - In response to Ginanjar's question

In response to a request for some background on the specific operation referred to in an earlier piece on vector multiplication, the above panes provide a figure and text from a modern text book on “visual complex analysis”, by Tristan Needham.  This is followed by an appendix from my first JOSA A paper on nodal aberration theory, JOSA A, 22 (7), 1389-1401 2005 along with a corrected typo, noted in the last pane.

A figure from a modern textbook on graphical interpretation of the mathematics of complex numbers, from T. Needham, Visual Complex Analysis, Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-19-853446-4

Continued in the next pane

Note, Eq. A5, should read

Mathematics and Science

As some know, my primary research work is in the area of nodal aberration theory.  The entry point to this aberration theory of optical systems with typically spherical or conic surfaces but without positional rotational symmetry is necessarily based in a mathematical operation introduced by R.V. Shack, my PhD advisor from 1978-1980, which he and I called vector multiplication.  At one point, I recall a rare outing, on foot, with Prof. Shack on the campus of the University of Arizona, in search of a mathematician who could point to a reference for this operation.

The operation can be accomplished by invoking the mathematics of complex numbers, but aberration theory in general has nothing to do with complex numbers.  When there is no symmetry however, it does have something to do with vectors, typically an aperture vector in the pupil of the optical system and a field vector in the image (or object) plane.  In most applications of interest, the plane containing the pupil and the plane containing the image are parallel, but not coincident.  The operation in question, detailed in my 2005 JOSA A article, is to “multiply” either two identical aperture vectors, or two identical field vectors, or, in the more interesting case, a coplanar aperture and field vector.  The result of this operation, which is not described in any reference on vector algebra (that I have found so far), is another vector, coplanar with the two vectors forming the operation, which do, by definition, always have a common origin, at least in projection.  In that it is a vector, it is not a dot-product, and, in that it continues to be coplanar with the two constructing vectors, it is not a cross-product.  The resultant vector has the same common origin, has an orientation angle that is the sum of the individual orientation angles of the two vectors being multiplied (notably from an axis which is by definition the zero orientation angle for the vector), and the magnitude is the product of the magnitudes.  In the course of writing this, I have been directed to Visual Complex Analysis, by Needham, as perhaps an acceptable merging of complex numbers with planar vector analysis.  I will look into this, perhaps even next.

It continues to fascinate me that there appears no other entry point to nodal aberration theory, which is clearly (to me at least) the most fundamental and general form of a description of optical aberrations in imaging systems, than to invoke an operation that essentially does not exist in mathematics as it is currently taught.  Actually, there is no mathematics for a physics characterized by functions with multiple distributed zeros, at this time (that I’m aware of).  Here though I expect it is ignorance on my part.  For those following this blog from the beginning, I wrote of my personal discovery of the work of Hestenes and Geometrical/Clifford algebra last year.  At the time, I thought that that work contained, somewhere, the operation Prof. Shack invoked.  However, I return to the topic today, to report that after reading A History of Vector Analysis, by Michael J. Crowe (University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), I’m not so sure anymore. 

Crowe’s book is fascinating to me in more than one way.  I have said earlier that the field of optical design came to be around 1880 when Zeiss, Abbe, and Schott worked together to first engineer optical glass and then to use it to create new instrumentation, starting with the microscope.  So while various forms of aberration theory appear earlier (I am still working on this timeline), starting it appears with Airy in the early 1800s and including the likes of Gauss, Coddington, Petzval, Seidel, and perhaps culminating (at least according to Andrew Rakich, and I tend to agree) with Schwarzschild in 1905, the industry came along somewhat later.  What really surprises me though is that vector mathematics, in fact, did not even exist in the modern form in 1900.  Until now, I viewed mathematics, particularly vector mathematics, as existing from long, long ago.  Crowe covers the period from about 1840 to about 1910, and focuses on in particular the work of Hamilton (as in the optics term Hamiltonian) and a lesser-known German, Grassmann.  Hamilton spent over 20 years and a majority of his energies attempting to create a mathematics that was termed quaternions (his book is available as a free download from Google Scholar and according to any and all scientists quoted in Crowe is literally impossible to read all the way through).   

 

 

Cover page of one of Hamilton’s two major works on Quarterions

Although I now know their history, I would be hard pressed to explain what “they” are.   My simplistic takeaway is this is a vector-like mathematics where the local coordinate system can be invoked on-the-fly and can be changed even within an equation.  Therefore, the equations contain embedded notation that conveys the local coordinate reference for each mathematical operation.   Although I have not found a book of the likes of Crowe, it appears that the period from 1910, where the scalar dot product and vector cross product and the divergence function does not yet exist in the modern form, to 1930 is the defining period for the acceptance of the modern form of vector operations and, to some extent, the death of quaternions (as a path within planar vector analysis), until recently.  At some point, someone named Clifford (perhaps a Clifford described by Crowe as a short-lived scientist who died young in 1879) comes along and establishes a basis for a now very obscure branch of quaternions that survives today with the work of people like Hestenes, whom I mentioned in an earlier piece.  However, at the point of this writing, it appears that what has come to be called Geometric Algebra, or Clifford Algebra, does not in fact contain, define, use, or describe the operation that Prof Shack invoked to discover the fundamental form of optical aberrations. 

The closest I found in Crowe is actually the first reference, on page 7, to the work of an obscure surveyor/mathematician, Wessel.  Somewhat interesting is that this is also, according to Crowe, the first reference to vectors (as in oriented lines), in 1799 and is based in the mathematics of complex numbers and the mathematics of, for the first time, inclined lines.  Previously, the only considerations in print described only parallel and anti-parallel lines.   As least based on the words, “…he proceeded to introduce the multiplication of lines.  The product of two lines (coplanar with each other and with the positive unit) was to have a length equal to the product of the length of the two factors.  The product line was to be coplanar with the two factor lines and was to have its inclination or direction angle (defined by reference to the inclination of the positive unit as zero degrees) equal to the sum of the inclinations of the factor lines“.  He in fact described the operation that we have adopted, whereby a vector is multiplied with another to create a third vector that remains in the same plane and not, as is the case with the cross product, in an orthogonal plane.  What is most interesting is that this is the only description of this vector multiplication definition that I have found and it does not appear again in Crowe’s book.  Most significantly, the mathematics that the remainder of Crowe’s book covers is conceptually based in managing and understanding planar areas bounded by vectors.   Since aberration theory has no relevance to the area concept, the mathematics of quaternions or its derivatives are not a reference point.

There was one more historically striking paragraph in Crowe.  He points out that Einstein, in the book with Infeld, considered the introduction the concept of a “field” into physics as the most significant event in 19^th-century science.  This comes up because one of the first people to use the divergence function was Maxwell, in developing his electromagnetic equations (prior to the concept of a field). This is one of the major topics areas in Crowe.  So, whereas we are currently a generation who spends much of our time in Flatland, as described by Gamow – 2D thinking – it appears that prior to about 1910, the thinking was purely in the context of lines and points (or the concept of needle space as recently coined by Prof. Jim Leger of U. of MN), which is exactly the scope of quaternion mathematics.

I’m now looking to learn similar information about the history of Clifford, and Clifford Algebra (I hear Geometric Algebra by Lee Dorst is a good choice) and the correlation of visual complex analysis with complex numbers (which sounds promising at the moment).  Separately, I hear, and it makes sense, that quaternions have finally been rediscovered and found a solid application – facet management in computer generated AI.  Stay tuned – and send feedback.

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

 

Some Lesser Known Perspectives on One of Our Heroes: Sir Isaac Newton

I was at a bookstore in Oxford recently, facing a lengthy return flight, when Joel Levy’s Newton’s Notebook, The Life, Times, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton  (£12.99, 160 pages, small format, 2009) leapt in front of me.  Actually, the most interesting aspect of the book to me is not described directly in the title, though the book covers to a large extent the personality of Newton.  Newton was not a nice person and he was not exclusively a scientist.  As an example, he was the Warden of the Royal London Mint (as in where the currency was produced), at a crucial time in the history of maintaining a viable currency in the war against counterfeiting.  I won’t save you from reading the book, but, I will give you some coverage of what you might learn, should you have only read Newton’s books (e.g. Opticks) themselves (or not). 

This book is written in a very interesting format, which I have not seen before.  In response to the age of sound bites and the Internet, the author has formatted the book two pages at a time.  Every pair of two pages opens with a header and contains multiple figures/drawings.   You can essentially enter the book anywhere.  It works, for me at least. 

Although the book presents a number of perspectives on Newton, the science is not excluded.  The author clearly represents Newton as the greatest scientist of all time and he makes a reasonable case for it.  It is truly astounding what Newton brought to science through his work.  He made fundamental discoveries across optics and physics and in many cases there is no precursor to his works.  The revelations are presented throughout science, with special emphasis on optics.  It is fascinating to the world of optical design that Newton made one errant conclusion based on an experiment involving creating a dispersed spectrum of sunlight regarding whether color correction can be accomplished.  

Newton’s earliest life was a mix of financial comfort mixed with stressful family and nonfamily relations, which I will avoid here.  He appears in Cambridge in 1660 amongst buildings that are still there, which I have visited more than once.  I was in the area recently and it is a great experience to visit this region.  The author describes the town of some 5,000-10,000 as significantly below what we might consider seedy.  The social structure of the school was based on wealth.  Although Newton’s mother was very wealthy, their relationship apparently at this stage was poor, and she entered him in the school without support.  As a result, he became a servant to the wealthy students and disliking this intensely (who wouldn’t?), he quickly becomes an outcast.  There are a number of interesting aspects mentioned by the author.  At this point, the school is 400 years old, and science really does not yet exist; being poised at the point of creation by the likes of Newton and Descartes.  At this point, the school is clinging tightly to a curriculum based on the Aristotle and is in the process of emerging from the cosmology of Ptolemy.  Science is emerging for Newton in the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes.  Descartes in particular provided the compartment from which Newton began to consider light, and more specifically color.  There no working theory of color at this point.  In this phase, he undertakes a number of self-destructive experiments, which become a characteristic throughout his career, in this case looking directly at the sun through a magnifier – not his best idea. 

I really like this book because it explains the source of many things.  For example, what the state of mathematics was before and after Newton; this was a dramatic period of change.  Again Descartes was his founding sources and according to the author, the works of Euclid and his disdain for them nearly led to his demise as a scholar, which I’ll again leave to you to read.

Under the heading of fate affecting outcomes, in 1665-1666, Newton realizes that he is at his intellectual peak.   The Plague appears, forcing the school to close for two years.  During this period, with the opportunity to concentrate on a single topic, Newton invents calculus – he invents calculus – stunning!  But, that is only the beginning—shortly thereafter, gravity is explained.  Here, the writing fails a bit; I would have liked considerably more insight into his thinking process.  However, there are only scraps of letters, which is impressive in itself, but insufficient to understand the emergence of the model.  Following The Plague, Newton returns to the college, in a better class of society through certain events.  Shortly thereafter, through various twists and turns, he becomes the Lucasian professor for life, an unassailable position, a status which clearly changes his personality.  From here he begins to define the absent-minded professor.

His first lectures as professor, were on light and color, based on experiments in 1664 and 1665.  In the author’s (Joel’s) view, these experiments of splitting light with a prism and recombining it again to white was “the first piece of true science ever done”, where 1664 then is “the beginning of optics.”  Note the trend: optics initiates science, yet again.  It was also in this period he made the first scientific error (see, it didn’t take long) misinterpreting data which leads him to conclude that axial color cannot be corrected – an error that stood in the way for decades (see Chester Moore).  Immediately thereafter comes the Newtonian telescope, and, in the process, some very dangerous experiments in alchemy to find a best substrate material (do not do this at home, or anywhere else for that matter).

So, at this point, halfway through the book, Newton seems interesting with a blazing intellect, yet a challenging childhood.   But, from here, his darker side is brought forward by the author, while in parallel bringing out time and time again the dramatic and diverse contributions to science.   Newton rose in stature to where he had access to the King (not necessarily a good thing) and to where he could ruin the careers of others (such as the Royal astronomer).  The discussion of this part of his personality frames a very vindictive, powerful man.  To some extent, the dark side peaks with his action to reduce, or in his fervor eliminate, counterfeiting from the world--clearly a lost cause--but points to his enlarged view of his influence at this point. 

I’m not looking to write a book report here, rather to let you know there is a solid, new, “quick read” book on some of the real Newton, which you might find enlightening.  I am finishing this outline while sitting through the leading papers at ISMAR, an emerging conference on Augmented Reality that I am attending for the 2^nd time, in Korea (my 1^st visit) – possibly the subject of the next writing. 

The “Sparsification” of Optical Glasses and Its Impact on Optical Design Optimization

As I mentioned in my last entry, I gave a talk at last week’s UK Optical Design Meeting highlighting a paradigm change in glass selection and optimization in optical design. The viewgraphs from my talk are available as a PDF file:

• Download Uk10_spie_Thompson_lunch_talk_glass_selection (2)

This talk highlights a very significant change in optical glasses that has occurred in response to the environmental movement.  As you may have noted, Canon and other Asian camera manufacturers began putting green-friendly labels on their camera lenses a while back.  I recall the first time I saw one, thinking it was a somewhat odd concept.  However, what it has become in fact is both an amazing marketing move that advanced the Asian glass manufacturers to the top of the food chain and at the same time has changed the course of optical design.  In discussions at the UK optical design meeting last week, they noted that the EU may have been the leading factor by issuing new, very strict rules especially in relation to lead.

As seen in the viewgraphs, a sample from which is above, the first optical glass catalog from Schott in 1886 offered 76 glasses.  I have plotted them on the current standard index versus V-(Abbe) Number chart.  From there, the Schott catalog expanded to over 250 flavors of glass, with the most significant addition being the addition of the LA series of glasses.  When I entered the field in the 1970s, Schott owned the market, with the Asian suppliers barely visible.  However, the very real pressure for environmental reform, particularly in Europe, forced Schott to re-evaluate its position.  Combined with the economic pressures of carrying so many glass flavors, they took this opportunity to reduce their catalog substantially, returning essentially to the 1886 situation, other than the LA glasses.  This is shown clearly in the viewgraphs of the talk.

What this has done to the optical designer is to have taken what had become for all practical purposes a continuous glass map, and made it in some regions sparse and in all regions an effectively discrete set.  This changes standard methods of optimizing with continuous variable glass descriptions within a boundary for index and dispersion.  As shown below, the current catalog is now far from continuous.  For perspective, the 1886 glasses are also shown illustrating that except for the LA-series glasses (and to some extent the FKs), the catalog is somewhat similar in density from this perspective.

This is a very significant change.  In terms of optical design, the continuous strategy used to-date must be converted to a discrete strategy.  This has been done in CODE V and the results, which are dramatic, are illustrated in the slides provided in the talk.

 

If you are a practicing lens designer, and you have not really realized the impact of the “sparsification” of the glass catalog, I highly recommend following the link above to the talk and reviewing the important results shown there.

The History of Optical Glasses: Recommended Resources

I gave several talks at the UK Optical Design Meeting in Oxford, UK last week (09/16/2010), a very nice, yearly event coordinated by Tina Kidger, Andy Wood, SPIE, and others.  While two of my talks were on beam propagation, one was on highlighting a paradigm change in glass selection and optimization in optical design, which I’ll discuss in my next blog entry.

In preparing for this talk, as I’m known to do, I dove back in history and found an excellent book on the research and science of Otto Schott working with Ernst Abbe that led to the formation of Schott Glass and in coordination Zeiss.  This is the period around 1886, which as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in many ways marks the beginning of modern optical design.  The book, available as a free download on Google Scholar, is

Jena Glass and Its Scientific and Industrial Applications
By Dr. Heinrich Hovestadt
Translated by J.D. and Alice Everett, MA
MacMillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1902
449 pages

For anyone who is interested in the science of making optical glass, and in a perspective on what drove the recent dramatic changes in the optical glass industry, this book is highly recommended.

The recent changes in the industry, which I will discuss in my next blog entry, become even more interesting in the context of two other books.  Both books emerged shortly after World War I and both highlight how the war dramatically affected the industry of glass making for optical purposes around the world.  One book describes the US perspective, and the other the British perspective.  Both books are excellent, for those with an interest in this topic.  The US-centric book is

The Manufacture of Optical Glass and Optical Systems: A War-Time Problem
The Ordnance Department, USA, Document 2037
The Washington Government Printing Office, 1921
Prepared by Lt. Col. F.E. Wright, Ordnance Reserve Corp.
Approved for publication by C.C. Williams, Major General, Chief of Ordnance, United States Army
521 pages

This book makes an excellent continuation to the earlier writings on Jena and does a good job of explaining the components involved in the development of glass flavors.  The second book is actually a chapter in

War and Economic Development; Essays in Memory of David Joslin
Edited by J.M. Winter
Chapter 8, Government and the Optical Industry in Britain, 1914-18, pp. 165-203.
By Roy and Kay MacLeod
Cambridge University Press, 1975

So, what actually happened then, and, what just happened in our newest century to the glass industry?

As the books following World War I both point out, both Britain and the US were caught completely off guard at the start of the war.  The American Civil War, and since I’m not a war expert, other wars I imagine, brought cannons to the rapidly moving battlefields.  These early cannons threw the equivalent of large rocks distances that did not typically exceed the line of sight.  However, in the intervening 50 years to World War I, technology related to cannons had advanced dramatically to the point where optical sights and binoculars were essential equipment. Germany, through the work of Schott, essentially produced nearly all of the world’s optical glass and optical instruments.  There is also a running commentary about dyes that I do not follow; if anyone does, I’d be interested in understanding that aspect.  In any case, back to glass.  As pointed out in the British book, wars were becoming an odd mix of incredible destruction and backroom negotiation.  In fact, it turns out that Britain had things that were essential to Germany and Germany had binoculars.  A trade, in Switzerland, on an ongoing basis was arranged.

In the case of the US, the response to the discovery that we could not make optics because we could not make glass was to initiate a crash 18-month program at Bausch and Lomb in Rochester, NY to learn how to make optical glass.  The Manufacture of Optical Glass and Optical Systems: A War-Time Problem details this effort and the reasonably successful results.

In my next blog entry, I’ll discuss the impact of environmental regulations on today’s optical glass industry.

"The Day We Found the Universe"

Summer is over.  Well, at least in New England it is.  Fall wandered in even before the Labor Day weekend.  So, it is time to return from the summer break. 

One of the most inspiring things I came across over the summer is a new book by Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe.  If you look back to my previous post, I wrote about the early photos of spiral galaxies, like Andromeda taken at Lick Observatory in the 1890s, and the Crossley Reflector by Isaac Roberts in England in the 1880s.  I was discussing how surprising it was that even with these early photos, the community did not decide that these were separate galaxies until almost 1930 (I just learned about this in a talk by Hubble on New Year’s Day, 1925). 

Marcia has written an outstanding book that covers exactly this question through exactly this period.  Written in a style that would convince you—or me at least—that she must have been there, it is a very engaging book that gives personalities to many of the key players that included Hubble, Shapley, and many others.

One of the best pieces of trivia: Lick (the person), who was trained as a woodworker in Pennsylvania and then moved to work for a time in New York City, was the first of the ultra-wealthy to see the longevity behind financing a large telescope.  His exploits in the business world are covered briefly.  He was responsible for bringing Ghirardelli chocolate to San Francisco from South America in 1848, importing 600 pounds of Peruvian chocolate made by his friend Domingo Ghirardelli in 1848.  Before that, Ghirardelli lived in South America for 27 years making “fine-wood piano cases” (I would like to find one of those).  Then, as people fled to the mountains to discover gold, Lick had the foresight to buy all of their available property in San Francisco and to sell it back to them when they returned. 

A somewhat fascinating aspect of the book is how she creates the mood around the conference of 1925, held on New Year’s Day, as was the tradition for the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society.  If you have any interest in astronomy, I do strongly encourage you to read the book. 

There is one more interesting turn about the Crossley Reflector that I had pictures of and wrote about in an earlier post.  It was in fact moved from England to the Lick Observatory in the 1890s, where it was refurbished.  The Crossley Reflector became the first successful large aperture (20”) reflecting telescope in the hands of Curtis, competing with the 36” Alvan Clark refractor, which it eventually surpassed.  This telescope paved the road for the 100” on Mount Wilson to follow and this sideline is followed in the book where Ritchey is featured.

In Marcia's book, there are many vignettes and portraits covering many of the more notable names in astronomy and physics, and some of the less notable.  In that, the author gives personalities to many of them and it makes for an intriguing read if you have ventured into that period of science at all.

Advances in Mobile Information Display: The ORA Personal Display

The amount of information we deal with on a daily basis is expanding. We must remember passwords for our email accounts and bank accounts, phone numbers, shopping lists, to-do lists, and the list goes on. However, there is a finite limit to our immediate memory capacity. The availability of wireless networks, miniaturization of electronics and sensing technologies, and novel input/output devices has given rise to mobile information display devices suitable for “on-the-go” daily use. For example, cell phones have become the center of daily communication and personal information management needs for many people.

The ORA Engineering Services team envisions a future in which people will transition from handheld cell phone displays to a more elegant solution to mobile information needs: head-worn personal displays. We have developed optics for a personal display prototype that we believe provides unique advantages to help enable this transition.

At the Optics + Photonics show this month, we had the opportunity to exhibit the personal display. You can view a video and article about the personal display on the Laser Focus World website.

A key differentiator of the glasses used in the ORA personal display (Figures 1 and 2) is the excellent ophthalmic quality see-through capability.  The ORA personal display glasses make use of an off-axis optical design as illustrated in Figure 3, which is an area of high expertise for our engineers, with three of the team’s designers earning PhDs in this specific field of optics and optical design. The design form is scalable from a 20-degree diagonal full field of view to a 100-degree diagonal full field of view (the size of the glasses will scale up or down with the field of view). The 100-degree solution, also developed by ORA, is in production now as the Link/L3 AHMD simulator display.  The ORA personal display has the following high-level specifications:

Eyebox diameter: 10 mm
Eye clearance: > 15 mm
Full Diagonal field of view: 20 degrees
Panel resolution: 432x400
Distortion correction is achieved by an electronic warper.

Figure 1

Figure 2 
 
 

Figure 3 Off-axis relay and combiner 

If you’re interested in finding out more about the ORA personal display, feel free to email me (kevin@opticalres.com).

City of Space and Hubble 3D

This week's entry is written by Bruce Irving.

On a recent business trip to Toulouse, France, I had a few hours free one day, and I visited a space museum called Cité de l’Espace. This excellent museum has many indoor exhibits related to space exploration, the solar system, and astronomy. It also has a number of outdoor exhibits, most of which are life-size mockups of various spacecraft, including the Russian Mir space station and the gigantic Ariane 5 launch vehicle (53 meters tall). There is also a large-scale model of the solar system, which illustrates the correct relative sizes (but not distances) of the planets.

The only spacecraft model of a directly optical nature is the ESA XMM-Newton x-ray telescope (launched in 1999, still operational). A separate building houses a large-scale digital planetarium and an IMAX Theater, which was showing the film Hubble 3D. This is a beautiful film celebrating the history and the amazing imagery of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The film incorporates 3D IMAX footage that was shot by NASA astronauts on the final Hubble servicing  mission (STS-125) in May 2009. The huge IMAX 3D camera was installed in the shuttle’s payload bay and positioned so it could film the space-walking astronauts as they worked on repairing the enormous HST, which had been captured and mounted on the repair platform in the rear of the payload bay.

The space walks were long, but the film clips had to be brief since they only had 8 minutes and 30 seconds of film installed. The 3D clips shot on the mission were combined with IMAX footage from previous service missions, as well as training footage and scenes of the astronauts inside the shuttle discussing the mission (and joking around). In addition, many of the astronomical images from HST were edited to show beautiful 3D effects that strongly demonstrate that these are indeed huge, 3D objects in space. The beautiful Hubble images really seem to come alive as you fly through nebulas and star nurseries and onto the very edge of the known universe.

 

Why Space Is Not Easy

I recently attended a small technical conference on stray light in Toulouse, France.  It was sponsored by CNES (the French space agency) and by several European aerospace companies. It was basically an optical engineering conference on a very specialized area of optics called “stray light.” As you can imagine, this means light that you don’t want showing up on the detectors of your optical system. A familiar example is a “ghost image” that you might see on a photo that you shoot towards the sun. You might see rings or hexagonal shapes or patches in your picture, obscuring part of the actual picture. These are internal reflections from the lenses or apertures that normally would be too faint to see unless the source is very bright (like when the sun is partly or fully in the frame).

In spacecraft optical systems (telescopes or imaging systems for Earth or other planets), this is a big problem. The sensors for these systems are very sensitive, and there are many ways for photons you don’t want to bounce around and find their way to your sensors, even if you are careful and don’t point directly at the sun, moon, or Earth (the brightest sources for most spacecraft). Preventing or reducing stray light is an important part of design and fabrication of such optical systems and can even determine the success or failure of a mission.

A case in point from a paper presented by Mr. Thierry Viard of Thales Alenia Space in sunny Cannes, France. The COROT spacecraft was launched in December 2006 to search for exoplanets with short orbital periods, especially large terrestrial (Earth-like) planets. COROT is a relatively small and low-cost spacecraft, so launching it to a dark, distant Lagrange point (e.g., L2) was not possible. An 800 km polar orbit would have to do, which meant that the very bright Earth would always be nearby (in addition to the sun and moon, though the sun would always be kept “behind” the spacecraft by pointing to a different area of the sky depending on the season).

The “transit” method of detecting exoplanets depends on recording very slight changes in the brightness of rather dim stars as a small planet passes in front of the star as viewed from our direction. The telescope had to be designed with a form that would minimize the chances of light from “off-axis” objects (those outside of the desired pointing area) getting to the detectors. Several optical criteria used in the chosen design form helped with this, in addition to extensive “baffles” (black metal rings that only allow light from certain directions to get in).

But this was not enough for COROT to succeed. The engineers also determined that cleanliness would make or break this mission. The slightest dust in the spacecraft could also scatter light to the detector, and such scattering had to kept to about 10 photons per pixel per second from the nearby Earth (which is putting out about 10^20 photons per second per pixel, a huge, huge number). This required keeping particle contamination (dust) to something under 200 parts/million, which is very clean even for a clean room used to building delicate spacecraft.   And there was no way to even test this without risking even more contamination, so it had to be based entirely on simulations. Pretty scary!

But guess what? The COROT optics team succeeded. When they first imaged the starry sky, it was pitch black except for the bright, distinct stars. Just as designed. They detected their first exoplanet  in May 2007, and the first Earth-like exoplanet , COROT-7b (1.7 times Earth’s radius) in 2009.

Of course there is much more to this or to any spacecraft than the optical systems. This is just an example of the clever engineering, hard work, extreme attention to detail, and ultra-high quality needed for any successful space mission. Space is not easy.

Photos courtesy of CNES.

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.

What if you could adjust the “filter” on your eyes?

For those in science, and particularly those in optics, we know that the eye responds to only a limited range of all possible wavelengths that are shooting past us.  We know short of deep blue there is the UV (and skin cancer).  The long of deep red is the infra-red, then eventually heat, and on to radio waves, extending eventually to the water waves on a lake, in a less abstract medium.  What if we had a button that allowed us to see other wavelengths?

Well, electronic detectors, like those on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), let us do just that.  By encoding wavelength information we cannot see in a spectrum that we can, we can begin to learn what the world, and better yet the universe, looks like at other wavelengths, and in fact how much there is to learn.  In fact, one important point when it comes to the universe is that light arriving here from far away is also very old—billions of years.  Light travels fast enough to circle the earth at the equator about 7 times in a second, but, on the scale of the universe that is actually pretty slow.  This old light is red-shifted (I am not going to cover this today), meaning, even if it starts out blue, by the time it gets here, it is not even red—it is deep in the infra-red. 

Subsequently, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) , designed to routinely look to and try to understand the edge of the universe, and therefore the edge of time (and no, I’m not going there today either), will have detectors that are designed to only see infrared light that we cannot ourselves “see”.  Starting at a large scale with the space-based telescopes of the last 20 years, we have been building a massive database of information in colors that we cannot ourselves see, including x-Ray (Chandra) and deep Infra-red (WISE).

That brings us to today’s “find”, which comes to us from ORA’s Mark Kahan.  It came to Mark from a friend, Art Ferruzzi, who is always on the lookout for interesting Internet articles in science.  There is now a web-link where you can call up regions of the sky/universe and dial in the wavelength bands you would like to “see”.

www.chromoscope.net

Somewhat reminiscent of recent photo reconstructions of space where they remove the “new” objects and leave only the really “old” ones, this view of our universe is truly inspiring.

It so reminds me of something I was once asked in high school, as I was labeled as the science kid in the group.  My friend from the age of 4 said to me, “I really hope I get to travel into outer space and go to another planet to see different colors”.  That was somewhat a confused view of the world, but, I will be forwarding this website to him next and let him know his wish has been granted, more or less.

Since we always like to have a graphic, this is one of my favorites, as I was not able to copy off of the live site successfully.  On the left, the darkest region in space over the format of the Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the ground in ultra-deep exposure mode (i.e., a region with the least number of objects).  On the right, the same region shot with the Hubble following the 1st repair mission.  Soon to be surpassed, I believe, by the new equipment.  If anyone happens to spot a new shot of this region, do let me know.

Wachendorf?

So, I am doing a little research on the history of aspherics.  I learned one thing.  The earliest written reference I found so far is a US patent by Abbe, US 697,959, filed in 1899.  Along the way, I came on the name of Fritz Wachendorf.  A new name for me, and interesting unto itself, but, even more interesting for the following, unrelated Google search experience.

Let’s say you are interested in finding out the most significant books specifically oriented to optical design.  Here is what to do:

1. Go to www.scholar.google
2. Type “F. Wachendorf” with the quotation marks

At least at the moment, where I am, the second item should look like:

[CITATION] Bestimmung der Bildfehler 5. Ordnung in zentrierten optischen …
F Wachendorf - Optik, 1949
Cited by 7 - Related articles

Now, click on Related articles and you should see, near the top,

[CITATION] Geometrical Optics
JG Baker - Fundamental formulas of physics, 1955 - Prentice-Hall
Related articles - All 2 versions

Now, click on Related articles again, and you now have pretty much the top 100 books in geometrical optics. 

I recognize the list, because I spent over 10 years, in the pre-Internet period, collecting old books in optics and this list parallels what was my collection.  That collection has since been donated to the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.  However, in a few months, the optics books in that collection that are dated before 1923 will be posted to the ORA website as they were recently scanned by Kirtas books using funding from ORA.  This will begin an exciting opportunity to get your own e-book, soft-cover, or, even hardcover version of the classics in optics, including, for example Coddington, from 1828 and Airy from 1850. There will be more on this, soon.  Try out the search series – the book list is really great.  And, there are a few articles that are interesting if you have missed them.  The one below for example. 

[CITATION] WHO? DISCOVERED CODDINGTON'S Equations?
R Kingslake - Optics and Photonics News, 1994 - opticsinfobase.org
In these formulae, s and t represent the distances from the point of incidence of the traced ray
to the sagittal and tangential object or image, measured along the traced principal ray, and r
is the radius of curvature of the refracting surface.

And, there appears to be a new book on photographic lenses out (don’t buy them all, I’m ordering mine tomorrow).  Looks good, especially if you happen to read German.

 

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. 

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)

Today Mark Kahan, ORA’s Chief Electro-Optical Systems Engineer, has contributed a short Guest Blog on NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).   

Mark is a Member of the WISE Standing Review Board, and, among other areas, he was involved in a number of different aspects of the Hardware, from Design through Test, and on to Cover Deployment and On-Station Performance. Many of the WISE Lessons-Learned J, over various Engineering & Managerial aspects, will be covered at the SPIE’s Annual Meeting in San Diego on 1 August 2010 as part of a broader Session entitled “An Optical Believe It or Not: Key Lessons Learned”.

---

The WISE mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program which is managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md. The Science Instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, using a Cryogenic Telescope, Aft-Optics, and Scan Mirror (shown to the right) built by SSG-Tinsley/L-3 Communications, Wilmington, MA, and the Spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, under the watchful eye of Ned Wright, the WISE Mission Principal Investigator (PI). Caltech manages JPL for NASA, and JPL was the Lead NASA Center relative to the responsibility of insuring the Hardware was built-to, and is performing to, Specifications (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/)

WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and it will spend nine months scanning the sky in infrared light, revealing all sorts of cosmic characters—everything from near-Earth asteroids to young galaxies more than ten billion light-years away. Before the Mission ends it should uncover hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Its vast catalog of data will provide astronomers and other missions with data to mine for decades.

Because so much has been written about WISE, this Blog will concentrate on providing a bit of added insight into the WISE First Light Image, and in doing so we can see why WISE has astronomers so excited.

Before WISE launched, this is what we could see at 3.5 microns in one area of the sky about three times the size of the full moon:

We could see a bit more at 12.5 microns:

 
Then we opened up the WISE Cover, and this is what we saw in the same area of the sky:

 
The 1st light WISE picture shown above was taken looking at the constellation Carina which is near the Milky Way (about 5 degrees out of the plane of our galaxy called the ecliptic). We were Nadir pointing  (i.e. we were pointing away from the earth, which is important so as to keep WISE cold), and we were in the Southern Hemisphere, probably over South America. We were staring at one region of the sky by controlling the S/C reaction wheels. Though this first image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction in order to help calibrate the WISE pointing system, the mission's survey is being done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the S/C motion to create 8.8 second freeze-frame images.

The "first-light" picture shows thousands of stars and, as was noted above, it covers an area ~ three times the area of the full Moon (WISE’s FOV is about ¾ of a degree by ¾ of a degree – actually 47 arc-sec, and the Moon is ~ ½ Degree). Eventually, if nothing goes wrong, WISE will take more than a million similar pictures covering the whole sky.

The first light picture shows infrared light from three of WISE's four wavelength bands: blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively. There’s a 25+ micron band too, but it wasn’t included for convenience and to speed up the processing to get the 1st image out-the-door (3 color printing is common; sometimes folks add a couple of bands into one of the 3 colors to add further information, but that wasn’t done in the first-light image).

The star labeled V482 is a bright M2 Giant [RA (2000.0): 093023.66, Dec. (2000.0): -582143.2] located about 1,000 (1,058 +230/-160) light years away from Earth, and is about 6th Magnitude (5.9, actually) in the visible wavelength region. Also, since it is a red giant star, it is quite a bit brighter in the infrared, almost first Magnitude by the time one gets to 2 microns (it is ~ 0.5 Magnitude in Bands 3 & 4, around 12 microns and 25 microns, respectively). A hot star like Vega will have the same optical and IR Magnitudes, while a cooler star will have brighter (smaller number) Magnitudes in the IR than the visible.

One question that comes up a lot on the WISE 1st Light Image (because it sort of sets a sensitivity threshold for comparison) is “Would the bright star be visible with the naked eye?” The answer is “Yes”. V482 Carinae is barely visible to the naked eye from a dark site. Bigger Magnitudes are fainter, and we usually say the naked eye limit is 6, though some people can see 6.5 and a few can even see 7 (sadly I can see less every year!). Each Magnitude is about a factor of 2.5 in brightness, and 5 magnitudes is exactly a factor of 100, so a Magnitude 1 or first Magnitude star (which is about what stars like the Belt of Orion or the Big Dipper are) are 100 times brighter than 6th Magnitude stars.

With 5-sigma surety, for hot stars with no IR “excesses” (a long discussion in and of itself), WISE can see down to < 16th Magnitude in Band 1, < 15th Magnitude in Band 2, < 11th Magnitude in Band 3, and under 8th Magnitude in Band 4.

Because this V482 star is at declination -58 degrees, you need to be at latitude -58 degrees for it to come overhead, and you can't see it all from the ground if you are north of 32 degrees latitude on Earth (which is the case for both Pasadena at 34.15 degrees, and Boston at 42.32 degrees).

Finally, WISE Pixels are 2.75 arc-seconds in size at the shorter 3 wavelength bands, but we agglomerate 4 pixels (so we’re 5.5 arc-sec by 5.5 arc-sec) at 25+ microns. The FWHM in the shorter bands is ~ 6 arc-sec and it varies over wavelength (in Noise Pixel/NP Terms we run from 12 to 40 NPs over wavelength band, at least when we’re staring; things go up a smidge when we’re scanning).

It’s great to see thousands of the tiniest of details come together in such a great way. Go WISE! J

 -Mark Kahan

Connections: before optical glass there was …a furnace?

A few years ago, I came to the somewhat soft conclusion that the world of optical design can be defined to have really started in 1886, when Schott, Abbe, and Zeiss got together and, with the help of new glass formulations, started to design optics, particularly for microscopes.  But then at last fall’s UK Optical Design Meeting, Jon Maxwell, formerly of Imperial College, handed me a paper on one William Vernon Harcourt (1789-1871) and said I “might find it interesting.”  He was right – and it changed my opinion of the origins of optical design.

James Burke’s documentaries, called Connections, have always been very impressive to me, because Burke did a wonderful job explaining how seemingly unconnected scientific discoveries and other historical events build on one another to bring about technological advances. Connections is available on DVD, and some episodes are also on YouTube.

I mention Connections because Harcourt made optical glass 50 years before Schott, but he did it not because he had a passion for glass, but because he had a passion for furnaces.  Harcourt had made essentially the world’s hottest furnace, and there was then a question of what to do with it. At this point, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) apparently broached the idea of using the furnace to make optical glass. Later, G.G. Stokes (1819-1903) moved the ball forward by encouraging Harcourt to try more experiments with optical glasses (at this point Faraday had shifted his focus to electricity). In the 1830s, as science was emerging really for the first time, there was a small group in England that formed under the affiliation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Harcourt was a founding member.  If you’re interested in finding out more about these connections, there’s a nice article by E. Scott Barr in the first volume of Applied Optics, where one finds a story on Stokes.

 
Example of furnace for the manufacture of optical glass, by Henry Bessemer, circa 1850. Bessemer presented a paper on mass production of steel to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. Image from Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S., An Autobiography, 1905.

For more information:
E. Scott Barr, “Men and Milestones in Optics,” Applied Optics, Vol. 1, No. 1, 69-73 (1962).

M. Cable and J.W. Smedley, “William Vernon Harcourt: pioneer glass scientist and founder of the British Association,” Glass Technology, Vol. 33, 92-97 (1992).

Yet Again – Something “New” from Google: Search Images

I started noticing a few weeks ago that when you enter a search, a link shows up with images related to the topic of your search.  I was busy at the time and didn’t really stop to realize how significant this is.  So today, it really took effect.  In preparing to attempt to explain Polarization to a class of students, I happened to type in the fundamental way to look at polarization, the “Poincare Sphere”.  Now typically I would have also gone to Google scholar at this point to see what original Poincare material is on-line, but, I am on vacation today (skiing in Powder Basin, Utah – very nice, 18” of new snow, sunny day, 30 degrees, are you jealous yet??).  Anyway, below is the collection of images that appears in the 4th or so link.  Is this great, or what?

I also learned a few things (I probably should have said relearned, but, I can’t remember).  There are 8 descriptors for a polarized E&M field; average intensity, average phase (these two also applied to an unpolarized field) and diattenuation and retardance with each of the latter two have three characteristics; magnitude, orientation, and ellipticity.  I always struggled with concept of more than 3-dimensions, but, here it is, an 8-dimensional space.  I also picked up that these map to the 16 Mueller matrix values, with the added concept of depolarization.  The depolarization created by a material occupy 9 of the Mueller spaces, the diattenuation and retardance get 6, and intensity gets the remaining slot. 

While the preceding paragraph is courtesy of Jim McGuire, Ph.D., the Director of Optical Engineering at ORA, and someone with a Ph.D. in polarization, even more can be found by visiting ww.axometrics.com, a company formed by his advisor, Prof. Russell Chipman of the University of Arizona. 

I’m sure I’ll come back to polarization, but, like I said, it is a vacation day (or evening at this point), so some other time.

One of the Most Significant Collections of Scientists in History?

I am fortunate to know, and live a few miles from, Prof. Emil Wolf, known for many things, but perhaps most popular as the author of Principles of Optics, with Max Born, 1959 (they have a first edition at the U of R., my version, bought when I entered optics, in Arizona, in 1976, is the 5th edition). He was recently honored for giving one paper in each of the last 50 years – how amazing is that?  We (my wife Prof. Jannick Rolland and I) try to go over, with the kids (Yvan 16, and Roman 14), at least once a month, to collect some of his stories.  The other night, he brought out, as he often does, something from his “collection”.  This night, he offered that we could take it home and try to create a copy (without opening the frame – as you will see this reveals some interesting features of slim digital cameras).  Shown below is a photo given to him by Max Born from a conference in 1927. 

Beyond being a fascinating collection of scientists, it illustrates nicely that these slim digital cameras have some serious barrel distortion. 

Although you could expand the photo, I’ll make it easier.  Most prominent is Albert, in the front row, just right of center, unmistakable.  What about the others?  I knew many, in fact most of them.  I had a few minutes (it’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting by the fire), so I thought I’d Google (Scholar) those that I knew little about.  This, of course, became immediately much too interesting.  The first one, in the lower left corner is “I. Langmeir”, for whom I knew nothing, other than recognizing the name.  Google Scholar does not reveal him on the first page.  Straight Google points to Wikipedia, who spelled his name as “Langmuir” and labels him as an atomist.

Irving Langmuir
Following World War I, Langmuir contributed to atomic theory and the understanding of atomic structure by defining the modern concept of valence shells and ...
Biography - Patents - See also - References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Langmuir - Cached - Similar

Even more fun, is the next link is to CERN, and, amazingly, this photo (with better quality).  Links to follow imply he traveled often with Madame Curie, who appears two seats to the right of him.

http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/cern/others/PHO/pauli-archive-pho//016.jpg

Next, to the right we find, Max Planck, known best for Planck’s constant,

Max Planck
Max Planck (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of the quantum theory, and thus one of the most ...
Biography - Religious view - Honors and awards - Publications
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck - Cached - Similar

There was also the following link on the lead page, that was interesting and relates to describing his Nobel prize. 

He is followed by Madame Curie, best known for contributions to understanding radioactivity.
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck%23Honours_and_awards&ei=3NxRS-SlEIiWtgeP_qytDA&sa=X&oi=oneline_sitelinks&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=3&ved=0CAsQ0gIoAg&usg=AFQjCNFK6GLcRm3AvCw7tyA9uqUXYrRJNQ
Marie Curie
Madame Curie was decorated with the French Legion of Honor. In Poland, she had received honorary doctorates from the Lwów Polytechnic (1912), ...
Early life - Sorbonne - New elements - Nobel Prizes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie - Cached - Similar

It is interesting to note the rest of the Google page lists biographies written on her, including one by her daughter – has anyone read this one?

Next comes H.A. Lorentz, who I recall as related to my E&M classes and some plots with someone else I cannot recall.  Again, we can resort to Wikipedia, to find:

Hendrik Lorentz
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the ...
Biography - Legacy - See also - References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Lorentz - Cached - Similar

The rest of the Google page is overtaken by links to one John H. Lorentz.

Lowry Hill - Biographies - John H. Lorentz
John H. Lorentz. Director of Alternative Investments. At age nine, John Lorentz completely dismantled his bicycle (much to his mother's horror) only to ...
www.lowryhill.com/biographies/ops_j_lorentz/ - Cached - Similar

I’m not going there, although I am curious to see what comes after “… only to …”

You can solve this inconvenience by noting the photo says “H. A. Lorentz” and going with that you get an interesting cover page in Google.  He received the Nobel Prize in 1902 and was selected for Project Gutenberg.  His books, some written about Einstein’s theories and some written with Einstein (and Minkowski) are available even now from Amazon. 

Next comes our hero, Albert…

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire on 14 March 1879. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and ...
Early life and education - Marriages and children - Patent office
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein - Cached

also on the Google cover page we find this fun image,

I may have to do something with this.

To his right, P. Langevin, again, a name to me, where we find,

Paul Langevin
Paul Langevin (23 January 1872 – 19 December 1946) was a prominent French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. ...
Life - See also - References - Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Langevin - Cached - Similar

 

One useful quote from the Google cover page is “Paul Langevin was the first person to write the 'Newton's equation' for a Brownian particle. ...”

Also on the cover page, we find he was Madame Curie’s “companion”, which at one point he defended by offering to duel, with real pistols – someone let me know what happened next?

Continuing right, we have next E. Guye, I had not idea who we have here, Google says, basically, he was at the 1927 conference – he does not rank a listing Wikipedia, yet.  As a result, his Google cover page lists a number of different links to the 1927 conference, and an earlier one in 1911.  His name is linked with DeBroglie and Lorentz-Einstein experiments.

Towards the bottom of the page is a great blog link – “the Lousy Linguist"
http://thelousylinguist.blogspot.com/2008/06/when-conferences-meant-something.html

Here you find the quote:

One of my all time favorite pictures, this comes from what may have been the most valuable academic conference in history, the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons held in Brussels, Belgium 1927. Rarely has a single conference involved such critical debate about a new theory (I'm no physicist, of course).

From Wikipedia's page: "Perhaps the most famous conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory.

How fun is that?  The title of the article is “When Conferences Meant Something”, how appropriate.

OK, two to go (in this row),  next we find another unknown to me, C.T.R. Wilson,

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
C. T. R. Wilson. The 1927 Solvay conference. Born, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson 14 February 1869(1869-02-14) Midlothian, Scotland ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Thomson_Rees_Wilson - Cached - Similar

Reading down the Google cover page for “C. T. R. Wilson” I realize I do know Wilson, he discovered, or invented, the cloud Chamber.  There are a number of great looking links on the page, should you be so inclined.

Finally, for today, we have another unknown to me, D.W. Richardson,

Owen Willans Richardson
Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 - 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on ...
Biography - Honours - References - Bibliography
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Willans_Richardson - Cached - Similar

Yet another Nobel Prize winner.  This is the only case I was forced to click through to fill in the … above.  It reads “…for his work on thermionic emission, which lead (sic) to Richardson’s Law.” 

"If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law  ."[3]

This also made available the photo below, again from this clearly monumental conference.

 

Niels Bohr and Richardson (right) at the 1927 Solvay conference

Born	26 April 1879 Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England
Died	15 February 1959 (aged 79) Alton, Hampshire, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Cambridge Princeton University King's College London
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	J. J. Thomson
Doctoral students	Arthur Compton Clinton Davisson
Known for	Richardson's Law
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1928) Hughes Medal (1920)

Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 - 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Since I seem to have exceeded the blog guidelines, 2 pages and 1 figure, and the fire has died down, I’ll save the remaining two rows, and those missing from the photo, listed at the bottom for blogs to follow.  Feel free to respond with more tidbits.

Some Really Old Photons...

... were recently collected by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope.  John Wood, one of my favorite scientists at NASA, from my days on the Hubble Repair team, sometimes send over some new results that he finds significant.  Since I wandered into optics to develop instruments for astronomers, after getting my initial degrees in Physics and accidently in Astrophysics, I’ve always tried to keep up, a little.  As you may recall, after a lot of politics, the Hubble was granted a new mission and some new instruments were installed.  They immediately went forward to repeat taking the now famous Hubble Deep Field shots, those with the longest possible exposure and in doing so, with the new equipment, resulted in collecting AND DETECTING some of the oldest photons ever, some 13 billion years old, shown below.

This comes to us from

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1001/11hubble/

which, of course, you should click on, if you have just 1 more minute. 

This got me trying to figure out how to relate to a 13 billion year old photon.  I didn’t get too far, but, try this.  I have had the misfortune to fly, so far, some 1.5 million miles on United, starting in 1992.  Since it is easy to relate to a mile, now I can somewhat relate to 1.5 million of them.  In a typical year, I fly some 100,000 miles.  Now, in round numbers, it is 25,000 miles around the earth, so, I fly about 4 times around it in equivalent miles in a year, at an average of 500 miles per hour, (not including airport time), thereby spending about 200 hours a year in an airplane.  Now light, on the other hand, inserted into a fiber, goes around the world 7 times, IN ONE SECOND, nice trick (where I’ve conveniently ignored the refractive index of the fiber).  So, light can go in somewhat less than a second, what it takes me 200 hours to accomplish. So, now I can almost relate to what light can do in one second.  A few other round numbers to play with, there are very nearly, pi*10^7 seconds in a year.  (pi=3.14).  So, light can go around the earth about 7pi*10^7  (~210,000,000) times in a year.  Now we’re getting close to one billion.  So, in 5 years, light can go around the earth 1 billion times.  So, here is an irrelevant statistic.  If light would travel around the world (it doesn’t since the it prefers a straight line, but, these days we could put it into a fiber), then, a pulse launched when I was born, would have now circled the earth over 10 billion times.  But, now 13 billion light years is another matter.  Since the 10 billion circlings of the earth only represent 1/7th of a second per circle, versus the distance travel by light in a year.  How to relate to that?  Well, the distance to the sun is slightly less than 100,000,000 miles (93 million actually).  Light that arrives here at earth is about, 10 minutes old.  (568 seconds).  In a day then, light can go to the sun and back, about 125 times.  So, finally, in a year, light can go to the sun and back about 125*365 times, or about 45,000 times.  At this point, I don’t think that helps me relate, but, almost. 

As an aside, Doug Goodman, being Doug, has a bag of poppy seeds, carefully measured out, to contain 1,000,000 seeds – should you every try to visualize 1,000,000 of something.  Then, you only need to visualize 13,000 of those (it is about the size of a sandwich baggie) to get to 13 billion.  Good luck.

Another Exciting New Telescope is Operational in Space WISE

In case you missed it, as many have been saying, there is a new, significant telescope now operational in space.  The “first light” photos have been posted at

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_first_light.html

and one is shown here.

To get some background on the telescope, there was an article in the LA Times earlier in December (that I missed, but Frank Moreno of ORA passed along.  That link is

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-wise10-2009dec10,0,5846611.story

Both sites are worth the 5-minutes. 

ORA’s own Mark Kahan was heavily involved with this program.  One of his recent roles, which is a somewhat obscure, but essential, corner of science is to ensure that all the necessary conditions are met to be sure the protective cover on the telescope actually does come off.  A problem encountered in an earlier test of an important space asset.  I’ll see if I can get him to write something on this, some time soon.  In the interim, enjoy the photos of space.

And now back to business?

Although I tend to concentrate on events in science, this came by this morning, from a coworker at ORA who retired some years back, Barry Broome.  This website, assembled by the magazine Slate, gives a very nice, very detailed, and reportedly unaltered, report that compiles the growth of unemployment for each county in the US by month since 2006.  While the results are discouraging, and I’m sure there are more than a few ways to interpret them, what is impressive is that the data can now be compiled so quickly and displayed so effectively. 

http://www.slate.com/id/2216238

It is very instructive to active the “play” button and see the map evolve.  If you have 2 minutes, check it out. 

Note if you launch from here, I found you have to click a few times to activate it.  I tried copying in a static map to increase your curiosity, but, I’m afraid you’ll actually have to click on the link.

400 Years Ago on January 7, 1610

It seems that the night of January 7, 1610, is recorded in the journal of Galileo as the night that he first saw the moons of Jupiter.  Jane Houston Jones, who writes an aperiodic newsletter for a group of amateur astronomers in Monrovia, CA, has gone to the trouble of commemorating the occasion by posting a scanned image of Galileo’s journal page to a blog site she maintains at JPL.  The link is

http://blogs.jpl.nasa.gov/?p=61

Perhaps even more importantly, she went to the trouble of typing to the side what he wrote (as his handwriting leaves a bit to be desired).  It is worth the click.

Coming soon is a running series of reviews of important antiquarian books in optics and optical design, and some physics and astronomy.  Keep a watch.

What We’ve All Been Waiting For!

 
This is probably the most important development in making the true, raw, history of science as we know it accessible to those of us who pursue it as a hobby.  The Proceedings of THE Royal Society are coming on-line, and they are even free, so far.  I can’t think of a more significant event.  This is the evolution of science and scientific thinking.  When I was in Scotland at the Royal Observatory, it was the first time I was in a room with the full collection, and it was all I could do to not call in sick, for a month and stay and read.  And, now, here it is, on-line for reading in front of my own fireplace.  Visit:

http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/

This website provides a collection of the curator’s 350 most important articles, integrated with a nice timeline and other graphics, it makes browsing the best of series painless and encourages you to venture into fields you wouldn’t otherwise take the time to research. 

This was announced earlier this last week and caught by Frank Moreno, ORA staff member, who is always on the lookout for things interesting.  The announcement is made at, among other places I expect, a BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8385560.stm

Speaking of reading, and on-line, I’m finally in the market for an e-reader.  The candidates appear to currently be the Sony e-book, the Amazon Kindle, and the soon to be Barnes and Noble Nook.  Of these, only the Sony appears to be configured for open access.  Does anyone out there have any experiences I should know about before making my holiday purchase?

The Arizona optics book collection, over 100 volumes of original optics books published pre-1920 are now at the book scanners, (KIRTAS in Victor, NY) and will soon be coming on-line on the Optical Research Associates website, courtesy of ORA and the University of Arizona.  These are books I collected in the ‘90s, while on a mission to find a copy of Coddington (and will include Coddington’s book).  Most of them, I never read, in detail, and some, like Dennis Taylor’s 1908 book on optical design, are true classics of the field.  Hence, the need for an e-book reader.  For those with an e-book reader, these books will be available, electronically, for download for, I believe, $2, (note the lack of zeros in that number).  For those not ready to go electronically, a hard copy of your very own (in softcover) will be printed on-demand for $20, and a nicely bound hard cover, with gold ink label even (I think), for $50. 

This new marketplace is going to make reading fun again.  More as it comes to be.

WFPC2 and COSTAR on Display

COSTAR
Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), "Contact Lenses for the Telescope," on display at the new "Moving Beyond Earth" gallery in the National Air and Space Museum's Mall building.

Image Number: WEB11281-2009
Credit: Photo by Eric Long/NASM
Copyright: Smithsonian Institution

 

 

 

In a May service mission, the systems WFPC2 and COSTAR were brought back to Earth.  WFPC2 is the oversized digital camera that recorded so many of the Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic images after its installation by shuttle astronauts in 1993. COSTAR is the other optical system that was installed in HST on that same first service mission. Its carefully designed and fabricated mirrors “popped out” into precise locations in the optical path to compensate for the famous error in Hubble’s primary mirror, allowing the originally installed science instruments to “see” sharp imagery from the telescope (WFPC2’s design incorporated its own correction and didn’t use COSTAR).

Now the camera that photographed so many stars is something of a “star” itself, on display in the main space gallery at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. And COSTAR is there too (pictured above), part of a new exhibit called “Moving Beyond Earth.” 

For more information, see this blog post at National Geographic, this recent article at The Space Review web site, or the press release for the new exhibit.

The 1st Astronomical Observatories in America

Which became an exercise in diversion, including:
the Mason-Dixon line, time-balls, chronometers, Goodyear, giants, and Indians

 

I have recently developed a theory that many, most, and perhaps nearly all of the larger aperture reflective professional astronomical telescopes in the world, built before say, 1970, may suffer from the fact that they were often polished in a horizontal position and tested in a vertical position resulting in astigmatism of varying magnitudes being polished into the mirror.  This then brings in to play my favorite topic, nodal aberration theory.  The figure below is one such example and historically is the first known physical evidence of binodal astigmatism.  For more on this topic, see the short newsletter article that I wrote at SPIE's request following my talk at SPIE annual meeting.

 

Figure 1. Through focus photographic plate taken with the 90” telescope of the Steward observatory, located on Kitt Peak in the mid-1970s. The boxes to the left and right are highly magnified regions of the star plate showing the ellipticity of some of the star images.  The two foci of the overlaid hyperbola are the locations of two positions in the star field with no astigmatism – labeled by Prof. Roland Shack, the discoverer, as binodal astigmatism, which led to a complete nodal theory of optical aberrations, my Ph.D.

 

But, that is not where this blog entry will go.  What was brought to mind was to answer the question, how many large primary mirror based telescopes were built before 1970?  This brings us to “Early American Observatories” by Willis L. Milham, which, happened to be on a recent book list that passed my way.  The “book” was in fact a collection of articles that were bound together for the author, who was “The Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy” at/by Williams College (and perhaps now you are in a position to guess where the first observatory is claimed to have been installed).  This book became the basis for two much shorter articles of the same title published in Popular Astronomy in 1937, (Vol. 45 (if my Roman numerals are right)). 

 

This path of investigation illustrated, yet again, just how fascinating it is to have the Internet.  The articles by Milham are a bit of a ramble, with more than a lot of trivia of who was a professor where and for how long. It seems that although Europe was actively developing observatories, with the likes of Herschel, America was not.  In fact, Airy, of Airy disk fame, is quoted as saying that in 1832 America had not a single observatory.  Not quite true it appears, but close.  Now, here is where Milham fills in for us.  He researched to find there were 11 legitimate candidates to be named early observatories in the U.S. erected by 1840.  Where “legitimate” is an attempt to rule out a 3” telescope in a wood shed, which at this point in time is in fact nearly a legitimate observatory, compared to the alternatives.  The article is readily found from the Google Scholar web site ( www.scholar.google.com) using a search like: Milham, “Early American Observatories”.

  

The outcome being that the Observatory at Williams College is not only the first, but, it is still standing (okay, it was still standing in 1937 when the article was written).  Milham has a quote from then President John Quincy Adams, in 1825, on the topic of forming universities in America (apparently there weren’t many of those either) that “Connected with the establishment of a university, or separate from it, might be undertaken the erection of an astronomical observatory, with the provision for the support of an astronomer, to be in constant attendance of observation upon the phenomena of the heavens …”  However, as it turns out, Congress never really bought into this idea, at least for the purpose of science.  The U.S. Naval Observatory was the first government-sponsored “observatory”, but I believe (and more research is needed) that it was created to help with surveying.  In fact, it appears that anyone in America who wanted the title “astronomer” on their business card in the 1800s would also most likely have the title of surveyor and often minister.  It is impressive then, to me, that the Lick Observatory (a subject of some later blog) was up and running in 1890.  If you ever find yourself in a used book store with any scholarly content, keep an eye out for the publications of the Lick Observatory, typically with publish dates in the 1890s.  These are great coffee table additions (or, if you decide not to, let me know where you saw/left it).

 

Along the way, Milham brings out a topic that has gotten more coverage recently, the importance of clocks, or, in that period, chronometers.  In and around 1840, it was still difficult to determine longitude as this can only be done well with a highly accurate clock, which did not yet exist.  This little detail causes Milham, and now me, to detour and, in his case, tell a long story of the details of placing the Mason-Dixon Line.  I assumed Mason and Dixon were politicians.  But, no, they are astronomer/surveyors!  Who knew?  If you like to clutter your brain with trivia, this is an interesting subject to pick out of the Milham article.  As it turns out then, the funding of astronomy was made in the interest of surveying and a better determination of the all important property line.  I find even now, I typically need a surveyor to keep my neighbors at bay. 

 

The article by Milham, for me, has more diversions than information on the primary mission.  In fact, it told me nothing of large reflecting telescopes, since, there are not any in America, yet.  Another example of a diversion that Milham creates, again related to time, is the topic of “time balls”, I assume like the one that remains in New York for use at New Year’s.  Again, the Internet can provide a whole series of articles on “time-balls” of the period, which were used to synchronize clocks over a large area for the purpose of accurate surveys, if I have it right.  As if this is not bad enough as a distraction, the first time balls were to be made by Goodyear (yes, that Goodyear), who had just figured out how to vulcanize rubber from the Amazon.  I am someone who has a substantial collection of books written by travelers to the Amazon, particularly in the 1800s, and as a result, I have read much on the discovery of rubber.  So, here it comes back in the form of time balls.  This all feels like an episode of James Burke series "Connections", by far the best use of a TV I ever found.

 

The final diversion for today’s blog is giants.  Now, this diversion is not directly Milham’s fault, but he contributes.  It seems there was a Dr. Humberd, who upon crossing paths with Milham, got enough of his attention to warrant receiving his own personally inscribed copy of Milham’s book.  This, of course, is the copy I have come to own.  Based on a prior experience, I now always look in the front cover of a book like this to see if there are any random names from inscriptions or book plates.  I search those names on the Internet, which turn into a full 1-hour talk on optics (I may blog sometime the first time I did this).  Humberd was a medical doctor who, yes, specialized in giants.  His claim to fame was to have reported the tallest (and apparently then dead) person in the world at 8’3”.  The person was most probably only 7’3”.  He also went to the trouble to paste in a cutout from a 1938 editorial advocating U.S. postage stamps of medical doctors.  Here, one is presented with yet another name to trace: Manasseh Cutler, “A versatile man, Cutler collected painstaking astronomical and meteorological investigations … he died in Hamilton, Mass., July 28, 1823.”  Finally, in a rare instance, this book also has a handwritten letter from Milham to Humberd.  The letter basically says to Humberd that the “observatory” he had inquired about was probably not for astronomical purposes but instead was erected to keep a watch for Indians! 

 

I am out of time ... back to the present.  Perhaps I’ll run down Cutler to see where he takes us, in the future.  To close, I encourage you to check out the Milham link.  There is a write-up of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s visit to the Hopkin’s Observatory on the campus of Williams College and, in fact, a wealth of just plain interesting material on the 1800s.  Although my “catalog” says I have it, I have not been able to locate an article by Elias Loomis in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in 1856 titled, “Astronomical Observatories in the United States” in my collection or on the Internet.  This was referenced by Milham and many others along the way.

 

The next blog entry will at least be initiated from the “Catalogue of the 16th Annual Exhibition of the Physical Society of London and the Optical Society, January 5, 6 and 7, 1926”, assuming I do not get distracted by something else first.

Figure 2: The Hopkins Observatory (in 1938), at Williams College, constructed from 1836-1838.

 
 

When Will Virtual be Reality?

A futuristic-looking Head Mounted Projection Display (yes, it really does work).
Image courtesy of ODALab, Prof. Jannick Rolland.

This week I attended the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) conference in Orlando.  This is an annual conference that circles the globe every three years, from the U.S. to Asia to Europe.  Next year it will be held in Seoul.  It started life as an IEEE workshop in 1998, maturing to a full conference in 2002.  In a year when any other conference I’ve been to was down 30% in attendance, ISMAR’s attendance doubled to 400, about the size of the upcoming International Optics Design Conference (IODC 2010) in Jackson Hole, WY in early June (couldn’t pass up the opportunity to plug IODC).

This year for the first time ISMAR attempted, with some success, to mix science and art.  Nearly one-third of the conference agenda was led by educators, performers, and authors.  While in general each group stayed on their own side of the hall, every now and then someone would find themselves in the “wrong” session.  In my case, this happened yesterday.  The speaker, a poet, was running down some recent works developed for augmented reality. Who knew? I found it to be a fascinating topic, well outside of my box.  In most cases, these are video format pieces that are meant to be experienced with a head-worn display (HWD), the latest terminology for this technology.  Which of course does not happen to exist, and therefore this art form is currently experienced though the screen of an iPod.  This is almost embarrassing to those of us who have been working diligently for over a decade to bring a personal HWD to a store near you.  In the piece that is the easiest to describe, the “artist” introduces you to “video archeology.”  You are given a map, a video, and an iPod customized to know where it is via GPS.  As you pass over key points on the map, the iPod displays video content created earlier, elsewhere, of events that took place at a location going back in time.  I found this to be a very exciting concept.  There were a number of other pieces that were more abstract, but nonetheless begin to show how transformational augmented and virtual reality is likely to be.

It was somewhat by coincidence that the talk I gave at the OSA Annual Meeting the week before, in San Jose, was on the technology of head-worn displays.  Coauthored with my wife, Prof. Jannick Rolland of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester (and formerly of CREOL), this paper reviewed some current technologies that are being pursued to result in a viable personal display.  The presentation used at both OSA and at a workshop at ISMAR can be downloaded here.*  In addition, there is an excellent overview article on personal displays in particular, authored by Dr. Ozan Cakmakci, the most recent addition to ORA’s Engineering Services Group, and Prof. Rolland, his advisor, in the April 2009 issue of Optics and Photonics News.

* I wasn’t on the ISMAR agenda, but since I had the material I sat in on a panel. It probably didn’t hurt that Prof. Rolland was the conference co-chair.

Ozan Cakmakci, who recently joined ORA’s Optical Engineering Group, sporting the latest in augmented reality eyewear. Image courtesy of ODALab, Prof. Jannick Rolland.

The look of the current generation of prototype see-through displays,
clockwise from the upper left: Lumus, Sony, ODALab, ORA.

Interesting Links

• International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009: http://www.ismar09.org/
• Optical Diagnostics & Applications Laboratory (ODALab): http://www.odalab-spectrum.org/
• OSA presentation, “The Coming Generation of Head-Worn Displays (HWDs): Will the Future Come to Us through New Eyes?”

Notes from a visit to the Large Binocular Telescope

 

Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking an “insider’s” tour of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), currently the largest telescope in the world based on baseline (22M) and I believe collecting aperture (although it’s hard to keep track), at 2X8.2M.  It was a very nice afternoon and the trees at the peak (10,200’) had turned a brilliant fall yellow.

Since one of my first experiences in optics was to star test one of the last of the six original mirrors in the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) on Mt. Hopkins south of Tucson, it was quite a reset to view how massive the LBT building is compared to the original MMT building, which can be seen from the LBT.  At one point we trekked all the way to the roof (OK, a lot of the trek involved a series of elevators), which is over 200 feet off the ground, to an unseen tiny cement escarpment that provides an amazing view back to Tucson and beyond.  In that we are recently applying nodal aberration theory to these telescopes, it is an interesting perspective to look at an 8.2M mirror and then contemplate the question, what does a 10-micron decenter actually mean?  With these mirrors, there is no absolutely smooth edge circular aperture to measure from.  These are spin-cast mirrors made at Roger Angel’s lab in Tucson and as such the edge is good, but is not a micron-level reference surface.  The experience reminds me of when I worked on an Air Force conformal optics project.  We kept asking for the wing profiles to a number like 10 microns.  The Air Force finally decided the best response was to put us on a plane to St. Louis, where we learned airplanes are made pretty much the same way as a Grumman canoe, containing over three miles of wire.  They do not work well as an optical reference surface.

Additional LBT informational websites are shown below:
http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Binocular_Telescope
http://www.aip.de/groups/lbt/
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/lbti/lbti_index.cfm (very short)
 
YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtOyCcJtzcw

I came across a website titled, “100 Hours of Astronomy,” which was created in the spring of this year as part of the global celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope. I did not spend much time there, but it appears to be a tremendous series of on-site interviews with astronomers at telescopes around the world. I look forward to taking some time to explore the website – enjoy!

100 Hours of Astronomy main page:
http://www.100hoursofastronomy.org/

New Evidence on the Dates of the Oldest Telescopes

Over the weekend I received several books on the history of telescopes from a number of sources, including my ”favourite” source -- the Royal Society.  The books included Charles King’s excellent “History of the Telescope” from 1955 ($75).  If anyone is interested in a copy, there was a second copy available, although it may well be gone by now.   This small collection will form the basis for my current project, creating a list of the observatories of the world -- with two goals.  First, to find how many have primary mirrors that are over about 30" in diameter and are constructed before 1970-1980 (and therefore are likely to suffer from binodal astigmatism).  The second goal is to determine if the database contains enough information to create an optical model of at least the main telescope.  Three of the books have lists of observatories that seem significant.  The list will be posted here when I get to it (holding your breath is not recommended).

On a slightly more informative topic at the moment; this morning's e-mail brought a message from ORA employee Mark Kahan, who mentioned he was having trouble sleeping and found his way to a website on the history of astrophysics.  There he found a recently posted discussion of a painting from 1607 by Jan Brueghel that appears to show a Keplerian telescope some 5 years before it is reported in the literature by Kepler.  This is going to make going to the museum so much more interesting.  It didn’t occur to me to look for optics in the paintings.  The link, which is a quick read and shows the painting could be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2696v1 and I highly recommend reading it.

The Speed of Light: An Evolving History of Computers and Optical Design

Optical design has always been one of the technologies that have ridden the leading edge of computer technology.  In 1951, James G. Baker, well known later in his career as, among other things, the optical designer of Polaroid’s innovative SX-70 camera, took on the role of principal investigator on what was to become a four-year program to attempt to implement optical lens optimization on the emerging set of first generation mainframe computers that came to include the Mark I, Mark II, and Mark IV generations of the Harvard Card Programmed Calculator computers that were developed by Aikens (Ref. 1).  Dr. Baker summarized his goal as follows:

“…we have before us the problem of transforming the art of optical design as pursued heretofore by the author into a science of optical design, as performed automatically by calculating machines.”  – James G. Baker, 1951

In the initial benchmark, the ray trace speed for the first aspheric surface was 36 minutes per ray surface (0.0005 ray surfaces per second).  In 1998, that number was 1,000,000 ray surfaces per second. Even over the four years when Baker was writing, the ray trace speed increased one order of magnitude as the Mark I evolved to become the Mark IV. 

According to the reports, the work was initiated in August of 1950 in Cambridge MA, at Harvard using the Harvard “Mark I Sequence Controlled Calculator.” Baker reports that as of December 24 (Christmas Eve), the group was using a “reasonably complete IBM set of machines,” including, as he notes, the supremely important Card Programmed Calculator (italics per the original report).  Baker characterizes this device as a “modern tractor with ancient plowshares.”  The actual computer is shown below.  This computer physically resides in the Smithsonian.

This characterization is accurate in that the Harvard Mark I-IV series of computers were not in fact electronic digital computers at all; rather, they were electro-mechanical machines along the lines of Babbage’s 1833 devices, created by Howard Aiken at Harvard beginning in 1937 with funding from IBM, and in fact were driven by a 50-foot-long drive shaft.  Aiken had come across the original hardware developed by Babbage in 1833 when he tried to develop (with only limited success) the first mechanical computer; the hardware was essentially lost in the archives at Harvard.  In studying the machine, Aiken came upon the concept of “a switchboard on which are mounted various pieces of calculating machine apparatus.” This became the Mark I.  It is worth noting that the Mark I was only 10X faster than the 1833 machine.

The final selected set of ray trace equations that were adopted based on optimal timing considerations is provided as a historical reference below.  The run time for the spherical version of the equation, in 1953, was 7.6 seconds per surface.

Further Reading

1. “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator,” Volume 8 in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, Tomash Publishers for MIT, a 1985 facsimile reprint of the 1946 original edition.

2. James G. Baker, “The Utilization of Automatic Calculating Machinery in the Field of Optical Design,” compiled and edited by James G. Baker, Volumes 2-12, 1952 – 1954.

If anyone is aware of a copy of this report, please respond. One copy, recently discarded by Perkin-Elmer, found its way to Dr. Baker just before he died.  Does anyone know where his papers now reside?  I heard that they are somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee.  One copy is known to exist at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  No other copies are known.  There were 38 copies originally printed.

For a perspective on ray trace speed and optical design, the plot below is an interesting metric proposed by Prof. Grievenkamp of Arizona.  It is a plot of the number of rays surfaces per second per dollar for computers historically used in optical design.  Additional data would be great to add.

Speaking of Old Books: The Crawford Library at the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh

Last week I attended the UK Optical Design Meeting, where I was invited to speak on the applications of my favorite topic, nodal aberration theory.  The meeting was held at the Edinburgh Royal Observatory, a beautiful building with a tremendous view. 

Built in the late 1800s, the building defines the classic European observatory. 

At the end of a day of talks on TMA telescopes and advanced instruments for astronomers, we were treated to a short tour of the library.  Given my earlier writing, this was a very timely visit.  It turns out that the library at the observatory houses what’s arguably the best and most complete collection of books in astronomy and optics in the world.  Books I’ve heard of for decades, and felt I had no hope of ever seeing, were all there.  It really is quite overwhelming.  This library is particularly inspiring as it provides close to complete coverage of the works in optics and astronomy before 1750 or even 1850.  It is very encouraging to see an intact collection of this magnitude, and gives real hope to the idea of assembling a tremendous collection that forms a complete basis for maintaining a robust history of optics.

The next step for me is to contact the librarian, who has promised that I can get a listing of their collection of 15,000 items.  I will also be discussing what it might take to spend a week at the library and whether I can full access to the collection, which appears to include Royal Society proceedings.  Obviously, more to come.

In the interim, I spotted the following reference, while scanning the shelves in the library:

A. Mark Smith in Transact. Amer. Philos. Soc., Vol. 96, Pts. 2, 3, 4, "Alhacen on the Principles of Reflection"

where Alhacen is more commonly seen as Alhazen.  This is often discussed as one of the earliest writings on light and optics.  The above reference is an English translation with commentary.  This has always been of high interest to me, making this a very exciting lead.

This thread leads one to the American Physical Society, www.aps.org, and trouble.  I managed to crawl away from the site with 11 new books on the history of optics:

Code	Name	Price	Qty	Total
0871697734	Descartes's Theory of Light & Refraction: A Discourse on Method	$20.00	1	$20.00
0871697521	Optical Corrections in the Sculpture of Donatello	$18.00	1	$18.00
0871699141	Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception (2 vol.)	$50.00	1	$50.00
0871692597	Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Memoir 259)	$85.00	1	$85.00
0871699532	Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest: Lens Making Machines & Their Significance in the Seventeenth Century (Transaction 95-3)	$24.00	1	$24.00
0871692384	Command of Light: Rowland’s School of Physics & the Spectrum	$30.00	1	$30.00
0871699621	Alhacen on the Principles of Reflection: Volume 1: Introduction and Latin Text; Volume 2: English Translation (Transactions 96 No. 2 & 3)	$50.00	1	$50.00
0871691833	Lines of Nazca (Memoir 183)	$30.00	1	$30.00
0871699657	Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science (Transaction 96-5)	$24.00	1	$24.00
1606189859	Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope: (Transactions 98-5)	$35.00	1	$35.00
0871696746	Invention of the Telescope (2008 Reprint) (Transactions 67 No. 4)	$30.00	1	$30.00

including the Alhacen discussed above.  I will report on the content of what I received when I return to New York early in October.  I encourage you to check out the APS site – it is very nice, obscure, and relevant.

Optics and the Sun

Solar energy is of growing interest and importance in the world, and optics play a big role. Optical design is needed for concentrating photovoltaic systems as well as solar thermal systems (although the optics in those systems are often a bunch of flat mirrors tracking the sun). ORA’s illumination engineers have been working on a lot of solar technologies the last few years, and we have developed some special software tools to help out with this work.

LightTools image of solar trough system

There are some enormous solar thermal installations operating in Spain and the United States, with more on the way in the next few years. But sometimes improvements in solar energy performance come down to the small things – and making the small things smaller. For example, an article in MIT Technology Review, “More Efficient, and Cheaper, Solar Cells” (http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23459/), discusses improvements to conventional solar cell manufacturing that could significantly increase the efficiency of multicrystalline silicon cells and bring down the cost of solar power by about 20 percent. This development was announced by a startup company, 1366 Technologies of Lexington, MA. The key to this work is figuring out how to reduce the shadowing and rejected photons caused by metallic conductors on the surface of the solar cell. People have found various ways to do this, but 1366 Technologies claims to be able to do it very cheaply with methods that fit well into standard production processes. They’re looking at increasing cell efficiency from the current typical 15-16% to 18% right away, with hopes of reaching 19% after further development. This has been demonstrated at production scales, not only in the lab.

Hubble's makeover is complete

NASA has just released the first official images from the recently rejuvenated instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope, and they are spectacular.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/ero/index.html

The new instruments are more sensitive, promising more efficient observations and the ability to look deeper into the past by imaging extremely faint distant galaxies.

Bruce Irving’s Blog

Bruce Irving has an interesting blog, made up of entries on the eclectic topics he’s interested in. Bruce is a singer-songwriter, a JPL Solar System Ambassador, an optical engineer (he’s a colleague of mine at ORA responsible for our international sales), a linguist and a really interesting guy! Here’s a link to his page:
http://flyingsinger.blogspot.com/

Here’s a link to an interesting piece he wrote about a PBS program called “400 Years of the Telescope”
http://flyingsinger.blogspot.com/2009/05/400-years-of-telescope.html

And here’s a piece he wrote on the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 – if my article didn’t satiate your interest!
http://flyingsinger.blogspot.com/2009/05/hubbles-wfpc2-farewell.html

Bruce might write an occasional entry for me on this blog, and I’ll be monitoring his blog for interesting optics articles and provide you with a link when they are published.