Interdyscyplinarne Seminarium Studiów ID, 7.05.2024

Sir Michael Berry,(ur. 14 marca 1941 w Surrey) – brytyjski fizyki teoretyczny, laureat prestiżowych nagród jak Medal Lorentza, Royal Medal i Nagroda Wolfa w dziedzinie fizyki. Współpracował z Andriejem Gejmem, późniejszym laureatem Nagrody Nobla. Zajmuje się zagadnieniami z pogranicza fizyki klasycznej, mechaniki kwantowej i optyki. Odkrywca fazy Berry'ego.

Abstrakt

Four geometrical-optics illusions

Centuries after the laws of geometrical optics were established, they still have nontrivial and
varied applications. Illustrating this are some illusions:
Mirages, and Raman’s error. Understanding why he denied the applicability of
geometrical optics requires careful exploration of the continuum limit of a discretelystratified
medium, to reveal its nonuniform convergence.
Oriental magic mirrors and the Laplacian image. The optics of these several-millenniaold
objects involves the unfamiliar regime of pre-focal brightening. The transmission
analogue (‘Magic windows’) raises a challenge for freeform optics.
The squint moon and the witch ball. The moon sometimes appears to point the wrong way
because we perceive the sphere of directions as a distorted ‘skyview’, on which geodesics
appear curved. This can be conveniently viewed and analysed by viewing the sky in a
reflecting sphere.
Distorted and topologically disrupted reflections in curved mirrors. Mirror-reflected rays
from each point of a continuous object form caustic surfaces in the air. Images are organised
by those points whose caustics intersect our eyes, and can be systematically understood in
terms of the elementary catastrophes of singularity theory.