Before you read this, I suggest that you read posts 22.1, 22.2 and 22.3. The picture shows a microscope. Light passes through a bi-convex lens called the condenser and then through a thin specimen that scatters the light. This scattered light then passes through another lens called the objective. The objective acts in the same… Continue reading 22.11 The microscope

Introduction We first met the mathematical operation of differentiation in post 17.4. But more information on this technique has appeared in many other posts. The purpose of this post is to bring all this information together in one place and to add some more to provide a single post on differentiation. In post 17.4, we… Continue reading 22.10 Differentiation

Before you read this, I suggest you read posts 17.15 and 17.16. About 40 years ago, Brian Pullan was Head of the Department of Medical Biophysics in the University of Manchester. Late last year, he sent me a problem to think about – it’s in the next paragraph. An ideal plane flies in a straight… Continue reading 22.9 More about flying

To understand this post you need to be familiar with the contents of post 18.2. The picture above shows cables supported by pylons; each section of cable hangs from two fixed points. Between these points, the force of gravity stretches the cable so that it falls into a curve. Until the early seventeenth century, people… Continue reading 22.8 The catenary

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 22.6. In post 22.6, we looked at the path taken by a ray when it is reflected by a concave surface. We looked at two types of concave surface. In the first, a section of the surface was the arc of a circle; in the second,… Continue reading 22.7 The caustic curve

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 22.4. When I wrote about reflection in post 22.4, I concentrated on reflection of light by a mirror. Concave mirrors are useful but the more familiar applications of reflection at concave surfaces involve focussing radio waves and microwaves from distant objects. Examples include radio-telescopes, receivers for… Continue reading 22.6 Reflection at concave surfaces – the satellite dish

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 22.4. In post 19.21, we saw that a ray of light passing from air into glass (or any other dense, transparent medium) is bent towards the normal to the interface between them, as shown in the picture above. In this picture A is a point in… Continue reading 22.5 Total internal reflection

A wave bounces back from a wall that it cannot destroy or be propagated through. This bouncing back is called reflection and is shown in the picture above. We are usually interested in reflection of electromagnetic radiation. For example, light is reflected by a mirror. A mirror is something that cannot absorb or propagate light… Continue reading 22.4 Reflection

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 22.1. The magnifying glass is a bi-convex lens that uses the light from an object to trick the eye into thinking the object is bigger than it really is. The way is works can be explained by ray-tracing, as shown in the picture below. In the… Continue reading 22.3 The magnifying glass

Before you red this, I suggest you read post 22.1. A projector is a device that uses light emitted by an original image to produce a larger version of that image on a screen (the projected image), as shown in the picture above. In this picture the blue arrow points upwards but in the projected… Continue reading 22.2 The projector