The assumption is . . . if you work with optics, you obviously know how they work. As crazy as it sounds, this is often not the case. For years I've given a pretest to every student I've ever taught for two primary reasons: first, if I know what students know and don't know, I can focus on what they need to know, and second, too often, if students don't really understand something well for whatever reason, they try to conceal that deficiency and don't get the help they need. The pretest puts everything on the table. What's stunning is that of the thousands of corporate students I've tested, very few of them passed the pretest on optics. And yes, almost all of them worked with optics on a daily basis.
It's not that product is not getting built and built well (turning knobs and praying to the gods of optics does seem to eventually work or the engineer with "magic fingers" shows up and saves the day), but the amount of time to complete the build (or alignment) and the frustration levels are insane. And of course, all that extra time translates into wasted money. In this blog series, I'll discuss optical principles, and how, if you understand these principles well, alignments will progress as planned and builds can be completed in their standard build time.
My first goal with this series is not to supplant a formal education in optics, but rather to offer an intuitive approach to understanding the basic concepts, principles, and methods of optics for those who have not had any formal training. The reality for many companies is that the majority of the production workforce at all stages of manufacturing, assembling, aligning, testing, and troubleshooting of optical components, assemblies, and products has had little to no formal education in optics and must rely on "duplication" to get product shipped. But duplication can only take you so far and the trade-off, as mentioned before, is costly. Therefore, my emphasis is on developing a working knowledge of optics with direct application-to-work in order to increase workers' understanding and performance in the workplace.
My second goal is to attempt to get a discussion started among you experts about lessons learned that only years of working with optics can bring to the table. The most important things I learned about optics did not come from the classroom, but working with great optical designers and engineers who shared their mistakes and successes with optics. Many moons ago, I attended a 5-day course given by Warren Smith based on his book the Design of Optical Systems, and although the book was highly informative, the anecdotes from his many years designing optical systems were worth their weight in gold. Even years later, I will remember something Warren had said about a problem or solution he had found in the lab, and it totally makes sense to me. The neurons connect and I can actually work myself out of an optical dilemma.
Having said that, if you're working with optics and have never had any formal training, you owe it to yourself and your company to get over to your local junior college and sign up for a class. Or if you're a manager, hire an optics trainer and get all of your folks trained. We all know that no matter how perfectly an optical system can be designed using the software available nowadays, there is no such animal as a perfectly working system out of the box. If everyone on the team has a solid foundation in optics, it facilitates a vocabulary in appropriate optics terminology with the optics experts in the company and problems can be solved faster and more efficiently. That translates into improved throughput and better margins.
In the meantime, I'm going to spend the next few weeks discussing the fundamentals of light emission, propagation, and interaction with obstructions and matter, the basics of geometrical optics, the fundamentals of wave phenomena, as related to light: interference, diffraction, and polarization, and especially image formation and aberrations due to the features of an optical system and this wave nature of light. So Happy New Year and I hope to hear from you!
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posted by: noreply@blogger.com
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:Now that we have clean optics . . . we need to know how they work!
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