While I'm not insulting UR, my observation makes optic uninteresting and boring because there is no such thing as optics for its own sake. It's just a collection of interesting crap with the interesting part taken out, such that the crap works to describe light and only light. In other words, it takes a few special cases from beautiful geometry and says that they describe an idealization of light in lenses. Next it takes a few special cases from the beautiful theory of the electromagnetic field to describe a few simple phenomema about light. It doesn't tell you a shred about the fundamental nature of the universe because, well, if you wanted to know that, you would just learn about quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Now THAT would be interesting.
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This page contains a single entry by Adam Anderson published on July 5, 2006 10:24 PM.
Dude, don't be dissing UR, one of the leading optics schools in the nation.
Optics is nothing more than special case of geometry and an application of electromagnetic field theory.
And how does that make it bad?
While I'm not insulting UR, my observation makes optic uninteresting and boring because there is no such thing as optics for its own sake. It's just a collection of interesting crap with the interesting part taken out, such that the crap works to describe light and only light. In other words, it takes a few special cases from beautiful geometry and says that they describe an idealization of light in lenses. Next it takes a few special cases from the beautiful theory of the electromagnetic field to describe a few simple phenomema about light. It doesn't tell you a shred about the fundamental nature of the universe because, well, if you wanted to know that, you would just learn about quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Now THAT would be interesting.