Sci/Tech Mexican Physicist Solved a 2,000-Year Old Problem That Will Lead to Cheaper, Sharper Lenses

tom_mai78101

The Helper Connoisseur / Ex-MineCraft Host
Staff member
Reaction score
1,632
tf2yuXW.jpg


It’s a problem that plagues even the priciest of lenses, manufactured to the most exacting specifications: the center of the frame might be razor-sharp, but the corners and edges always look a little soft. It’s a problem that’s existed for thousands of years with optical devices, and one that was assumed to be unsolvable until a Mexican physicist developed a mind-melting formula that could revolutionize how lenses are manufactured.

On paper, a curved glass lens should be able to redirect all the rays of light passing through it onto a single target known as its focal point. But in the real world, it just doesn’t work that way. Differences in refraction across the lens, as well as imperfections in its shape and materials, all contribute to some of those light rays, especially those entering the lens near its outer edges, missing the target. It’s a phenomenon known as spherical aberration, and it’s a problem that even Issac Newton and Greek mathematician Diocles couldn’t crack.

New improvements in design and manufacturing, including the use of additional aspherical lenses that can help counteract and correct the spherical aberration effect, mean today’s lens-building techniques come very close to producing uniformly sharp images. These lenses don’t have a perfectly spherical shape and can be very expensive and difficult to manufacture and design as lens makers essentially have to experiment and come up with a different aspherical shape for every application.

But that’s all going to change thanks to Rafael G. González-Acuña, a doctoral student at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey. After months of work, he managed to come up with a mind-melting equation that provides an analytical solution for counteracting spherical aberration, which had been previously formulated back in 1949 as the Wasserman-Wolf problem which stumped scientists for decades.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
General chit-chat
Help Users
  • No one is chatting at the moment.

      The Helper Discord

      Staff online

      Members online

      Affiliates

      Hive Workshop NUON Dome World Editor Tutorials

      Network Sponsors

      Apex Steel Pipe - Buys and sells Steel Pipe.
      Top