Books >> Reference

A sand-based optical bench sounds like a great (read "cheap") idea, but it's simply impossible to get rid of the floating grit. Even if it's later sealed up, pouring the sand gets grit all over. It only takes one tiny speck to throw Newton's rings all over a setup. OK, that's relatively harmless (unsightly, but harmless), but it could equally well get into and ruin a spatial filter.

I found the theory section of this book hard to follow, despite several degrees in engineering.

This is by no means a bad book. It has much useful information. Go to the library and borrow this one, then make use of the good parts. But buy Iovine's excellent book "Homemade Holograms" instead.

Where to buy lasers? How does it all work? How do I set up the tabletop? This is a lab manual that doesn't subject us to much optics math, but rather inspires us to marvel, and guides us with easy to follow sketches to find personal and expansive philosophical answers, without really telling us what we'! ! ll find when we have so followed. There is a even section on "the holographic brain", "holocosmology" and other artistic and philosophic excursions.

Wonderful photos show Dr. Dennis Gabor who conceived of a hologram in 1948, while working on the electron microscope, 13 years before the laser was invented. One shows him accepting the Nobel Prize. He looks a little like Salvador Dali.

This book could perhaps be the basis for a "hologram merit badge" for, say, a group of kids from ages 9-13, let by an adult who needs an excuse to actually set this all up. Laser safety is explained, too.

"These are the early days of holography," the author muses in the preface, "we might compare ourselves to photographers working prior to 1860....We welcome you, as a fellow pioneer, to join in the excitement of being involved in it from the beginning."

And you won't need much more than this book to delve deeply into this wizardry, either. W! ! ell, ok, the sand.

A sand-based optical bench sounds like a great (read "cheap") idea, but it's simply impossible to get rid of the floating grit. Even if it's later sealed up, pouring the sand gets grit all over. It only takes one tiny speck to throw Newton's rings all over a setup. OK, that's relatively harmless (unsightly, but harmless), but it could equally well get into and ruin a spatial filter.

I found the theory section of this book hard to follow, despite several degrees in engineering.

This is by no means a bad book. It has much useful information. Go to the library and borrow this one, then make use of the good parts. But buy Iovine's excellent book "Homemade Holograms" instead.

Where to buy lasers? How does it all work? How do I set up the tabletop? This is a lab manual that doesn't subject us to much optics math, but rather inspires us to marvel, and guides us with easy to follow sketches to find personal and expansive philosophical answers, without really telling us what we'! ! ll find when we have so followed. There is a even section on "the holographic brain", "holocosmology" and other artistic and philosophic excursions.

Wonderful photos show Dr. Dennis Gabor who conceived of a hologram in 1948, while working on the electron microscope, 13 years before the laser was invented. One shows him accepting the Nobel Prize. He looks a little like Salvador Dali.

This book could perhaps be the basis for a "hologram merit badge" for, say, a group of kids from ages 9-13, let by an adult who needs an excuse to actually set this all up. Laser safety is explained, too.

"These are the early days of holography," the author muses in the preface, "we might compare ourselves to photographers working prior to 1860....We welcome you, as a fellow pioneer, to join in the excitement of being involved in it from the beginning."

And you won't need much more than this book to delve deeply into this wizardry, either. W! ! ell, ok, the sand.