Product Description

Principles of Optics is one of the classic science books of the twentieth century, and probably the most influential book in optics published in the past forty years. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, with new material covering the CAT scan, interference with broad-band light and the so-called Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction theory. This edition also details scattering from inhomogeneous media and presents an account of the principles of diffraction tomography to which Emil Wolf has made a basic contribution. Several new appendices are also included. This new edition will be invaluable to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in most areas of optics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62066 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 986 pages

Professor H Phillip Stahl Physics & Applied Optics Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
One of the most advanced and comprehensive optics text availabe...To know all it contains is to know nearly all of optics.

Review
"Principles of Optics is a great, rigorous, ponderous, unwavering mathematical tract that deals with a welath of topics...a great book, the seventh edition is a fine one, and as I said, if you work in the field you probably should own it." Physics Today

"Principles of Optics is a great book, the seventh edition is a fine one, and if you work in the field you probably ought to own it." Physics Today

Book Info
Provides a comprehensive treatment of the theory of scattering of scalar and electromagnetic waves, including the Born series and the Rtov series. Explains the effects of spatial coherence on the spectrum of light, illustrated by Young's interference experiment with broad-band light. DLC: Optics.

Customer Reviews

Need modernising
Yes - all classical (linear) optical concepts are in here, and yes, it's the 'bible', but it's very dated in its content, style and references, generally, and not very practical to use.

I wish Hecht - or someone like him - would re-write this classic as a more advanced version of his book.

The Bible

Amazing book. It's the bible of geometric optics. Have everything you might need.

Needs a little previous knowledge, but which book doesn't?

A Classic in the Science of Optics
I read this book in the late sixties, when some of my fellow engineers built and tested an acoustic lens for a developmental company. Born & Wolf were well-acquainted with antenna aperture theory, and were among the first to write that the human eye could resolve 5X better than aperture theory would predict. This they credited to involuntary eye movements called flicks and saccades, which when combined with the brain's ability to do signal processing, was able to produce much better resolution than would have been predicted by the diameter of the retinal rods. In many ways the book gives testimony to God's wonderful gift of vision with color, depth, clarity, and order.