DESCRIPTION
Approaches the topic of physical optics with examples drawn from the physical processes described. Includes chapters on Fourier transforms, image formation, optical coherence, diffraction, interference, holography, interferometry, analog optical computing, synthetic aperture imaging, and others. Contains more than 600 photographs and line drawings and more than 650 references.
EXCERPT
The three of us who author this preface do so with some considerable emotion since our colleague and co-author George Reynolds is no longer with us. George died just after the manuscript was sent to the publisher. We dedicate this volume to his memory as a colleague and a friend of many years. Those who knew George as an optical scientist will miss his continuing important contributions to our field of endeavor but will ever value his many fine original papers as well as his expository writings. Those of us who knew George as a friend will miss the warmth of his friendship and the pleasure of his quick wit even more than his science. There is a tremendous amount of George Reynolds in this book, but any errors that the reader finds must be the responsibility of his co-authors.
This volume, of course, grew out of the original Physical Optics Notebook,
authored by George Parrent and Brian Thompson, which was first published in book form in 1969 by the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) and was subsequently reprinted. The material in the original book first appeared as a series of articles from 1964 to 1967 in SPIE's journal. The philosophy behind these articles and the resulting book was simply that some of the material we wished to teach was not readily available in a form that matched our particular pedagogical style. Furthermore, we wanted to produce a series of articles that would be helpful for self-study by the reader. To this end, we sought to keep formalism to a minimum, preferring physical implications over mathematical rigor. One of our goals was that every result developed should be accompanied by examples drawn from the physical process it was meant to describe. These goals remain a dominant feature of the present book. We have been gratified by the favorable response to this approach over the years, despite the many shortcomings in other aspects of our presentation.
The original authors resisted the pressure to revise and expand the Physical
Optics Notebook until some years ago when the perfect co-authors, namely, our old friends and colleagues John DeVelis and George Reynolds, volunteered to undertake the task with the single caveat that they be allowed to "add a few chapters." The book has grown from 16 articles to 38 chapters! The original articles have been revised, and additional material selected from some of the tutorial writings of the authors has been revised to meet the demands of the book. Other chapters and sections of chapters have been written to complete the set of topics that we felt should be covered.
We sincerely hope that the reader, whether a student in the classroom or a
self-study student, will find the mixture of fundamentals and the application of those fundamentals to real problems to be an appropriate and stimulating approach to the material.
No instructional text should be expected to stand truly alone, and this tutorial is no exception. While emphasizing interpretation and applications, we have kept the essential formulae. However, for rigor and complete derivations, we make extensive use of references. While extensive, the references in this book are by no means all-inclusive; rather, they reflect the authors' prejudices in that they are the references we have found useful for teaching. At a minimum, they will lead the reader to other related material and original papers.
The reader will find some redundancies, but we feel that repetition on occasion is of value in the learning process. Furthermore, to remove them would have interrupted the logical flow of some of the arguments.
Finally, a word about the illustrations: In our view, the many figures and
photographs throughout this volume are essential to the book as we have
conceived it. We have done our very best to give the proper credits for those illustrations and we apologize in advance for any errors we may have made - they were certainly not intentional.
In conclusion, we hope you will enjoy reading this tutorial, which we consider a memorial to our friend and colleague George Reynolds, without whom the project would not have been completed.
