What is light? and The basics of Holography

What is light?

This simple and apparently innocent question has stirred up considerable controversy among scientists since the time of Newton. A complete answer is by no means easy because the theory of relativity has changed old conceptions which for years were considered to be established facts.

Newton in his experiments with the prism broke up a beam of light into its component parts and produced the different colors. Having done this, he threw all these colours together again to bring back the original white light.

Newton later suggested the corpuscular theory of light in which light was supposed to consist of minute particles or corpuscles shot out from the luminous body. He attempted to explain the various phenomena of reflection, refraction and polarization by modifying the properties of these corpuscles to fit the various conditions.

The wave theory and many other theories are used to understand about optical world. If we want to develop our knowledge in optics, we should understand many other concepts. Like the basics of reflection, refraction, diffraction, interference, polarization, coherent source of light and so and so. 

At present laser and hologram technology is growing. With the help of these principles, we can understand about modern virtual image formation. The hologram technique is one of the very interesting concepts which creates holographic images.

The Basics of Holography

Holography technology is one of the growing technologies. Holography is a Greek word that means whole writing. The principles of holography were first put forward by Dennis Gabor in London.

His invention consisted of a method for improving the resolution of images obtained with an electron microscope. Dennis Gabor announced his concepts in 1948, and he was awarded the Nobel prizes in Physics in 1971 for his study of three-dimensional lensless methods of photography.

Gabor technique was to cause a beam of coherent light to be scattered from an object. The two sets of waves coming together on a photographic plate would produce interference fringes.

This holographic technology is used in many fields like medicine, these holographic images are very useful during laser operation.