Optics

What Hacker News says

1. itishappyFeb 2024
   Optics - Eugene Hecht

   Undergraduate level reference text that I see in almost every optical engineer's office. It's dense, but it's thorough.

   https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/5054148/mod_resou...

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2. BalgairMar 2021
   Bit late to the party, but this person is very much correct. I also do BMI work and optics is undoubtedly the future for neuroscience. The optics book you want to get is Hecht:

   https://www.amazon.com/Optics-5th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0133977226

   That's a good intro into real optics.

   It's much more than the optics chapter you'll get in a physics textbook. It goes over the classical ray optics in good detail, does a great job with traditional matrices and that formulation of optics (the one that the design programs like Zemax use), goes well into the real meat-n-potatoes of wave optics (including birefringence, a huge part of biological optics), gives you a good accounting of how lenses and other optical devices are actually Fourier transformers, and also dives into the more esoteric optical devices (a must for practical neuro-optics).

   It's an upper-division/graduate level book, fyi. So I'd back-load it in your study course. Though in terms of neuro-optics it's more of a keyhole book.

   If you are particularly interested and really want to know what's actually going on with EM, then you need to go through Jackson:

   https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Third-David...

   This is the book on EM, but is very much physics graduate student level. And honestly, I don't think you's need it for BMI stuff. But if you don't go through it, you'll just be trusting other people when they say your ideas won't work and they can't really explain it to you. Just going through Jackson is a bit of a hazing experience and will earn respect.

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3. cornellwrightMar 2021
   Optics by Eugene Hecht is a fantastic reference to start with. It's a bit expensive, but you can find used copies if you look around a little bit.
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4. georgeburdellJan 2020
   I can recommend Hecht’s Optics textbook for this. I found it at my local library. I have had a number of electromagnetics courses over my life and none explained the unifying scattering principles of reflection, transmission, and refraction concept so clearly as that book
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5. tomkinstinchAug 2012
   For spectroscopy, I'd go to the online handbook put out by Richardson Gratings:

   http://gratings.newport.com/information/handbook/handbook.as...

   For a textbook, this one is pretty good:

   http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Spectroscopy-Donald-L-Pav...

   For optics, Hecht is the classic text:

   http://www.amazon.com/Optics-4th-Edition-Eugene-Hecht/dp/080...

   I'd suggest Keating though, since it is a more comprehensive overview and includes things like the human visual system and some basic math review:

   http://www.amazon.com/Geometric-Physical-Visual-Optics-2e/dp...

   For instrument design in general, these books are outstanding:

   http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scientific-Apparatus-John-Moo...

   http://www.amazon.com/Optical-System-Design-Second-Fischer/d...

   Of course, any understanding of spectroscopy should include some background of the physics behind what you're measuring. Any modern physics book would be fine: Krane, etc.:

   http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Physics-Kenneth-S-Krane/dp/1118...

   Haven't tried this one, but it looks cool:

   http://www.amazon.com/Spectroscopy-Reading-Stellar-Practical...

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6. thrown_22Aug 2022
   You need to give some information about the scene to the network.

   Camera settings is just a short hand to describe the field of view and depth of focus (at the very least). If you make that implicit you'd still need to give the network the steradians, focal length, circle of confusion, etc. etc. etc. that you want your image to use.

   You'd need to understand everything in Hecht's Optics to tweak all the parameters of an AI generated image.

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