13: Optics
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- 13.5: Wave Optics
- So far this book has discussed the interaction of light waves with matter, and its practical applications to optical devices like mirrors, but we have used the ray model of light almost exclusively. Hardly ever have we explicitly made use of the fact that light is an electromagnetic wave. We were able to get away with the simple ray model because the chunks of matter we were discussing, such as lenses and mirrors, were thousands of times larger than a wavelength of light.
Contributors and Attributions
Benjamin Crowell (Fullerton College). Conceptual Physics is copyrighted with a CC-BY-SA license.