I’ve always been fascinated by optics. It was one of the many great discoveries made by Sir Isaac Newton.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid I used to come up with all sorts of ideas for optical devices. Most of them were based on a wrong idea of how optics worked, but that didn’t stop me.<\/p>\n
Now that I know a little more, I like the idea of teaching optics through the use of software toys. Such a toy should allow you to create and then combine optical elements at will, varying such things as surface curvature and index of refraction — things that are difficult to vary in the real world.<\/p>\n
Ultimately we’d like those toys to exist in a kind of tangible augmented reality, but we are not quite there yet. The next best thing is to simulate optics on a computer screen.<\/p>\n
For this week’s Widget Wednesday I am sharing with you one of my software experiments with optics<\/a>. This program just focuses on letting you define your own lenses, and showing you what happens to the light rays that pass through them.<\/p>\n Try it. I hope you find it illuminating!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve always been fascinated by optics. It was one of the many great discoveries made by Sir Isaac Newton. When I was a kid I used to come up with all sorts of ideas for optical devices. Most of them were based on a wrong idea of how optics worked, but that didn’t stop me. … Continue reading “Widget Wednesdays #3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24013"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24013"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24015,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24013\/revisions\/24015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}