6Understanding Optics
Introduction
Optics as a science and a technology covers a tremendous range of material. Fortunately, only a limited subset of this material is essential to the field of laser safety. With a few exceptions, this chapter concentrates on the narrower field of geometrical optics, which is the branch of optics that deals with lenses, mirrors, and optical instruments that use lenses and mirrors. After a brief discussion of the nature of light and the relation of geometrical optics to the more comprehensive fields of physical optics and quantum optics, the fundamentals of the behavior of rays within the geometrical optics formalism are presented. Next, how the behavior of rays can be used to make lenses that focus ...
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