About This Blog

What’s this stuff about?  Who would care to read this?

I want to include in this blog miscellaneous information, tips, and hints about doing optical work in the laboratory; hopefully stuff which is useful to the interested reader. The “interested reader” in this case will be someone who is not already a recognized expert in the field of applied optics. If you are an expert and know how to do a wide variety of optical testing, measurements, and can set up optics in an eye-blink, the stuff I’m going to tell you is likely to bore you!

If you happen to be an engineer working in industry who has been stuck with an optical measurement task, and you feel a bit lonely in that industrial lab, this information might be useful. If you are a student (any student, from high school to graduate-school-almost-got-my-PhD) well this might be interesting. If you are a hobbyist trying to set up some optics in your garage for the fun of it, well maybe this could be helpful stuff. This stuff is mostly going to be technical in nature, but with a leaning towards the applied side. Not much theory and not much math to be had here! We are not going to derive any equations or prove any theories here. Look, there are lots of great textbooks on optics and optical physics for those seeking the deeper depths of the theory. I could not compete with the academics anyway.

This is about “Optics Lab Tips and Tricks”; that is, information which you probably will not get from your college optics class, or even from your lab exercises, because they stress other aspects of optical physics. You won’t get this out of a textbook, for the most part. This stuff is mainly useful and practical hands-on information which I had to learn by myself the hard way, by making mistakes, interpreting all the literature I had access to, trying new things, and then working out my own methods. This is not a book so this information might evolve in a way which seems non-optimal. I am also solely responsible for any errors which may occur in this material. My recurring admonition to the reader will always be: “Do good work!”  That’s what our goal should be.