3 ms·
Where in day-to-day situations, like walking around outside or in a building do you see diffractive phenomena where a ray approximation breaks down far enough f
by wnkrshm 8y ago
Where in day-to-day situations, like walking around outside or in a building do you see diffractive phenomena where a ray approximation breaks down far enough for you to notice?
Usually all of that is smoothed over by light sources being extended sources not points, so the interference contrast is lost by infinitely many interference patterns being overlaid incoherently. Also, almost all light sources (except for rlasers) have microseconds of coherent emission, so the pattern changes so fast it blurs into a regular blurry edge of shadow.
I can only think of some very special situations where some blinds select a very narrow angular range of sunlight and then you see interference fringes in the shadow.
Or when you look into a puddle with an oil film or at some sort of diffraction grating or holographic film (which can be predicted with ray-based methods, like Wigner-distribution based ray-tracing, though that still comes with some error at large angles).
Even in laser optics, 95% of the optics design is done with geometrical optics methods, because the rays you use can be related to the phase profile of the radiation in the system. You can then integrate (with rays) the diffraction pattern (but not as well in the shadow of apertures ofc).
- toolslive 8y agoplenty of examples, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon) is a pretty one.