Some thought experiment about the well known Ship of Theseus. It goes like this: imagine a ship leaving shore to go on adventures. Every day, the ship gets damaged and repaired with new material. One day it is a piece of the hull, another day, it is the sail, and so, and so. Eventually, all the elements of the ship have been changed. Is it still the same ship? One might say yes....
This post aims to provide comprehensive guidance on cleaning optical elements. While there is a wealth of information available online, particularly on suppliers' websites, I want to consolidate all the knowledge I've acquired over the years working with lasers, fiber optics, and other optical equipment, including some tips and tricks....
I have started a project that requires the use of a raytracer. Basically, I hope to make a library for rendering optical paths using raytracing and simulate the result that one would get by looking through the optical system. Hopefully, I would like to be able to write somewhere that I will have a couple of lenses here and there, give the parameters such as the refractive index and curvatures and ...
So, 5 months ago, I have written a post about Artificial Intelligence and General Artificial Intelligence. You can see the tone from my first post was very optimistic, a little too much maybe, with the hope that things would accelerate soon. I have been using AI a lot recently and I want to report on my understanding of what AI can and can't do and how to use it as effectively as possible....
Continuing my series of post covering my talk from last Christmas about the use of lasers in space and astronomy. The topic today is adaptative optics. I'll explain the reason why we need it, and how it works in simple terms. Enjoy....
So this post and a bunch after this one are from a talk I presented at the end December on the topic of lasers in space and astronomy. The target the audience was members from astronomy groups in the region with some knowledge of optics but not necessarily lasers and the curious people that might be interested but have a physics background from high school. I tried to make it interesting for a wid...
It was a nice cold morning that day, with two layers of clouds, one at the surface of lake Neuchâtel, and another layer at approx 3000m. Just enough to touch the tip of some summits in the prealps. The sun was rising and started to cast some interesting shadows along the way. It is a phenomenon that is commonly called crepuscular rays....
So that is it. I have been, like many others following what is the biggest paradigm shift of the past hundred years. In my opinion, the true next big step in human history that is being taken right now, as some people might seem to realize it, but also as many others simply ignore....