Collaborate Disseminate
We all know that light and sound are wave phenomena, but of very different kinds. Light is electromechanical in nature, while sound is mechanical. Light can travel through a vacuum, …read more Continue reading Acousto-Optic Filter Uses Sound to Bend Light
Play around with optics long enough and sooner or later you’re probably going to want a spectrometer. Optical instruments are famously expensive, though, at least for high-quality units. But a …read more Continue reading Pi-Based Spectrometer Puts the Complexity in the Software
The basics of digital logic are pretty easy to master, and figuring out how the ones and zeroes flow through various kinds of gates is often an interesting exercise. Taking things down a level and breaking the component AND, OR, …read more
Continue reading Interference Patterns Harnessed for Optical Logic Gates
In graduate school, I had a seminar course where one of the sections was about X-ray crystallography. I was excited, because being able to discern the three-dimensional structure of macromolecules just by shining X-rays on them seemed like magic to me. And thanks to a lackluster professor, after the section …read more
Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide to X-Ray Crystallography