William Phillips
Nobel Prize in Physics 1997
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by William Phillips
“The anniversary issue of Born and Wolf invites reflection on how important this classic has been and continues to be. I learned optics in the last century, at the beginning of the laser revolution that breathed exciting and vibrant new life into what had become a crusty old subject. The optics I learned as a student had an antique, nineteenth-century feel. The optics I confronted as a researcher was explosive in its modernity, with Born and Wolf as the guidebook. Today, no optics practitioner’s bookshelf is complete without Born and Wolf. For answers in classical optics, this is the first stop.” (from Amazon)
by Max Born, Emil Wolf·You?
by Max Born, Emil Wolf·You?
Principles of Optics is one of the most highly cited and most influential physics books ever published, and one of the classic science books of the twentieth century. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this remarkable book's first publication, the seventh expanded edition has been reprinted with a special foreword by Sir Peter Knight. The seventh edition was the first thorough revision and expansion of this definitive text. Amongst the material introduced in the seventh edition is a section on CAT scans, a chapter on scattering from inhomogeneous media, including an account of the principles of diffraction tomography, an account of scattering from periodic potentials, and a section on the so-called Rayleigh–Sommerfield diffraction theory. This expansive and timeless book continues to be invaluable to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in all areas of optics.