Do the people who do optics for a living (opticians?) use principal
rays? Many principal rays involve points on the optical axis that are
one focal length from the optical element. What name do these people
use for those points?
Daniel Crowe
Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics
Ardmore Regional Center
dcrowe@sotc.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Forum for Physics Educators [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu] On
Behalf Of John Denker
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 10:57 AM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: [PHYS-L] optics terminology
John Mallinckrodt wrote:
Can you give some examples of the definitions
you're referring to?
I'm just going by what I hear around the lab, i.e. the usage
of people who do optics for a living, i.e. people who build
their own home-brew scanning confocal microscopes from scratch.
There's not AFAIK parallel rays anywhere within such an
instrument, yet everybody refers to the "focal point" the same
way they would refer to the "focal plane" of a non-confocal
instrument.
There's logic in this. As I said before, the "one-f" focal
point emerges as a corollary in the less-than-general case
where the object is at infinity. Special case ... often an
interesting special case ... not the definition.
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