Re: New Invention Ideas

Rex Stomponato wrote:
"Phil Hobbs" <hobbs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8pSei.7$XH5.6@xxxxxxxxxxx

Lenses have to be designed, they don't work by accident. There are lots
of patent lens designs, and some of them are even useful.

The physics and engineering of lenses hasn't changed very much in 100
years--we now have optimizing ray tracing programs, automatic surface
generators that can make aspherics, computerized measuring
interferometers, somewhat better glass, and much better coatings, but the
basic tradeoffs are the same, and many of the same designs are still in
use. (Real lens designers, please chime in--have I left anything out of
this list?)

More or less true I suppose.

In half that amount of time, we went from the Wright Flyer to Sputnik, and
from mechanical adding machines to Google. Optical systems design is a
slow-moving field, and there are good reasons for that. People have been
making eyeglasses since the 13th century. The properties of curved
mirrors were known to Archimedes, and those of lenses to the tenth-century
philosopher Alhazen around 1000 AD.

OK , fine.

However w/o photolithographic lenses there would be no computers at least as
we know them.

At this time they are able to produce features as small as a few tens of nm.

The demise of optics (to produce computer components) has been announced
prematurely many times over many years.

Sure, I'm not throwing rocks...I was trying to explain to the OP that especially in a field like lens design, a novice is very very unlikely to come up with anything fundamentally new and better. Folk like that often feel slighted when people don't take their ideas seriously, and this one seems like a reasonable fellow as enthusiasts go. (Any volunteers to make a sci.optics FAQ?)

Optics is indeed an ancient field but it is not static or stagnant and it is
constantly rejuvenated from within and without..

Snell's law and more generally Maxwell's equations have yet to be discarded.

Exactly.

Alhazen (Al Haytham) had no *quantitative* understanding of refraction from
what I have read.

I'm not sure. Certainly spectacles were in wide use by the 13th C and by the 15th C they were cheaper (in terms of hours worked by a skilled artisan per pair of spectacles) than they are today (as I learn from one of the papers on the site Prof S. pointed us to).


Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
.

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