optics Archives - Science Connected Magazine

Sunsets: Sunset seen at the coast in Novigrad, Croatia. Thin clouds turn a normal sunset into a sci-fi worthy sunset. [EOS 7DmkII: 400mm, f5.6, ISO 100, 1/2000 sec]

Sunsets are Illusions

September 28, 2015September 25, 2015 Science Connectedlight, Optical Illusions, optics, Photography, science and art, Sun, Sunset

By Steven Spence “It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light,[…] and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” (Carl Sagan, Pale…

Brain-like computer: Artwork courtesy of CoolDesign via freedigitalphotos.net

Engineering Physics Technology

Brain-like Computers from Optical Fibers

March 10, 2015September 4, 2015 Science ConnectedAI, artificial intelligence, computer science, hardware, materials science, new tech, optics, physics, telecommunications

Computers that function like a human brain could soon become a reality thanks to new research using optical fibers made of speciality glass. This research has the potential to allow a faster and smarter brain-like computer that can learn and adapt. Researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, UK, and Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies (CDPT) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have demonstrated how neural networks and synapses in the brain can be reproduced with optical pulses as information carriers, using special fibers…

Energy-space photo of light confined on a nanowire, simultaneously shows both spatial interference and energy quantization. (Fabrizio Carbone/EPFL)

Physics

First Photo of Light as Wave and Particle

March 2, 2015September 4, 2015 Science Connectedelectromagnetics, light, materials sciences, optics, physics

In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed that light has properties of both a wave and a stream of particles. Now, researchers in Switzerland have taken the first ever photo of light behaving both as a wave and as a stream of particles at the same time. The ability to observe light in this way could bring us a step closer to building super fast quantum computers, the researchers say. When UV light hits a metal surface it causes an emission of electrons. This is known as the photoelectric effect. A research…