This highly recommended book masterfully fills a significant lacuna in optics education with an innovative approach. The author, following five decades of teaching optics, provides an expert guide for student pairs to assemble commonly available optical components (not from commercial kits), and to achieve their alignment, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation.
The extensive scope includes geometrical optics, physical optics, optics of materials, atmospheric optics, relativistic optics and quantum optics. The author provides a comprehensive set of suggestions, pitfalls, line drawings and images of typical assemblies of optical components for each chapter. For each experiment he presents the key elements of the theory, a clear definition of the technical terms, the underlying mathematical description of the phenomena, real images of the phenomena, and graphs of the key parameters. The color figures of the instruments and light ray paths are invaluable.
The level of the experiments augments the 4th edition of Optical Physics. Selected references augment the chapters.
Review by Barry R. Masters, Fellow of AAAS, OSA, and SPIE.
The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or OSA.