2 SOME BASIC IDEAS IN GEOMETRICAL OPTICS
2.1 THE CONCEPTS OF GEOMETRICAL OPTICS
Geometrical optics is used as the basic tool in designing almost any optical system, image forming or not. We use the intuitive ideas of a ray of light, roughly defined as the path along which light energy travels, together with surfaces that reflect or transmit the light. When light is reflected from a smooth surface, it obeys the well-known law of reflection, which states that the incident and reflected rays make equal angles with the normal to the surface and that both rays and the normal lie in one plane. When light is transmitted, the ray direction is changed according to the law of refraction: Snell’s law. This law states that the sine of the angle between ...
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