Science Fun: Theory of Optics

International Journal of Science Education, 2010

Journal of Education, Teaching and Social Studies, 2020

The paper examines ways of teaching wave pulses traveling on strings and wave fronts in two dimensional waves. The phenomena examined for pulses are: reflection, transmission and superposition. Two methods of finding the refracted wave fronts, the corresponding rays and the refraction angle are presented. Then the gradual change of the speed of propagation of a wave is presented. In the last part is examined the application of the concept of wave fronts in lenses and Huygens’ method of finding the shape of a perfect lens. The students’ difficulties with connection with all these subjects are presented.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2019

A number of studies have described the benefits of the incorporation of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) for learning, and teaching science as a process, for promoting conceptual changes, and a deeper understanding of scientific ideas. Physical Optics is a topic of difficult comprehension, and this fact was also observed at thePontificia Universidad Católica Argentina when students received traditional instruction. This article describes a project to improve the teaching of interference, and diffraction of light within a historical context. Care was taken in developing the line of historical thought, and the study of the hypotheses of the nature of light in proper chronological order. In order to assess the outcome of this methodology, surveys on the subjects of interference, and diffraction of light were conductedduring three consecutive years. During the first year a textbooks based teaching without historical insight was imparted; later HPS based methods were introduced. T...

Science & Education, 2011

There are two indisputable findings in science education research. First, students go to school with some intuitive beliefs about the natural world and physical phenomena that pose an obstacle to the learning of formal science. Second, these beliefs result from the confluence of two factors, namely, their everyday experience as they interact with the world around them and a set of operational constraints or principles that channel both perceptually and conceptually the way these experiences are perceived and interpreted. History of science suggests that the theories of early scientists through which they sought to explain physical phenomena relied mostly on ideas that closely fitted their experiences of the relevant phenomena. This characteristic of the early scientific ideas is the root of the epistemological difficulties that early scientists faced in their attempts to explain the phenomena. In this paper, we focus on the early theories in optics (from ancient Greek to the late Islamic scientific traditions) and argue that students face some of the same epistemological problems as early scientists in explaining vision and optical phenomena for the reason that students' intuitive beliefs are also closely tied to particular phenomena and as a result the underlying notions are fragmentary and lack the necessary generality that would allow them to cover many disparate phenomena. Knowledge of these epistemological problems can help the instructor to identify the key elements for a better understanding of the formal theory of optics and, in turn, lead to a more effective instruction.

Centaurus, 2017

Physics Today, 2000

Handbook of Biomedical Optics, 2011

Optics Education and Outreach II, 2012

The history of optics is a very rich field of science. It is possible to find many simple and significant examples of the application and success of the experimental method. Therefore, history of optics is a very good tool to teach students about the way science proceeds and to introduce the right spirit of critical analysis, building and testing of models, etc. Optical phenomena are specially well suited for this because, in fact, optical observations and visual experiments have made science advance in a significant way along different periods of history. In many cases experiments are essentially visual, and quite simple in concept. Besides they are easy to reproduce their experimental setups in classrooms. Also, the intrinsic multidisciplinary character of Optics, which is a subject that has historically influenced in a notorious way fields as art, philosophy, religion and cultural and social studies in general, provides a wide frame that permits to apply these examples to a large variety of learning levels. We present here some ideas about the role that history of optics can play in teaching and show some real examples of its application during the many years that we have been employing it in the context of the Optics School of the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain.

The paper examines different ways of using historical resources in teaching refraction related subjects. Experimental procedures can be taught by using Ptolemy’s and Al Haytham’s methods. The student can check the validity of the approximations or rules which were presented by different people. The interpretation of the relations is another subject. Refraction phenomena were interpreted either by the principle of least time or by particles or by waves. The law of refraction can be used as an example of a law which was discovered but put aside. The use of the law to construct lenses can be seen in Ibn Sahl’s hyperbolical lenses. Al Farisi’s method of ‘‘cones’’ is used for the interpretation of the rainbow. Al Farisi’s model was discovered again by Descartes. These models were not able to explain the supernumerary arcs. For this reason a simple wave model is presented. The models proposed by Al Haytham of atmospheric refraction can be used to show that refraction actually cannot be considered as the cause of the change of the size of the moon. Finally Huygens model of refraction in the atmosphere is used to introduce the wave fronts as more fundamental than rays.

Education Sciences

In this article, we analyze the basis of a proposal that allows teaching the notions of reflection, refraction, interference and diffraction from a unified perspective, using Fermat’s variational principle, recovered by Richard Feynman in his formulation of the paths sum for quantum mechanics. This allows reconsidering the notions of geometrical and physical optics, using the probabilistic and unified model of quantum mechanics by means of mathematical notions that are accessible to high school students.