Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

petapixel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 219 posts

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#91

Post by magicalhippo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #38
magicalhippo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in astronomy you usually want your telescope to be able to observe different targets. So it depends on the details of how the correction surface has to change when the image-object distance. If it's just a mild deformation and offset, then yeah I guess technology similar to adaptive mirrors could work well.

Distances are usually treated as infinity, at least in astrophotography. I'd be surprised if this secondary lens was able to distinguish between light coming from 1ly and 1000ly

Doh, of course. Not sure what I was thinking.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#92

Post by nuxi »

jjeaff wrote: post #79
soganess wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really natural, on first mention, to refer to something using a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? From that point on, to avoid repetition, mix in antecedents or generic names. Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item…

Hazelnut spread is one of those things that is much more commonly referred to as the brand name. No one says "Reynolds wrap" they say "aluminum foil". No one says "hazelnut spread", they say Nutella. No one says "resealable sandwich bags", they say ziploc bags.

Nutella though is a sugar-and-palm/vegetable-oil spread, which - probably accidentally - contains traces of hazelnuts, powdered milk and cocoa.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#93

Post by robocat »

jjeaff wrote: post #79
soganess wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really natural, on first mention, to refer to something using a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? From that point on, to avoid repetition, mix in antecedents or generic names. Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item…

Hazelnut spread is one of those things that is much more commonly referred to as the brand name. No one says "Reynolds wrap" they say "aluminum foil". No one says "hazelnut spread", they say Nutella. No one says "resealable sandwich bags", they say ziploc bags.

> No one says "resealable sandwich bags", they say ziploc bags.

Everyone says resealable bags. I've never even heard the word ziploc. In New Zealand.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#94

Post by kragen »

There are various people speculating on the economic significance of this solution, which, to me, is rather missing the point. It's like measuring the significance of the excavation of Tutankhamen's† tomb by the tourist revenues of museums. The point of economics is that it keeps us alive so we can do math and also think in other ways; the point of consciousness is not to make money.

I don't think there is any economic significance. They found a closed-form formula, not a manufacturing process. They verified that it produces numerically correct results to 12 significant figures, but typical lens grinding is only accurate to about 100 nm; if your lens is 10 mm thick, that's an error in the 5th significant figure of any coordinate. Calculating a numerical solution to the Wasserman–Wolf problem to 5 significant figures is straightforward, and you could probably do it by hand if you didn't have a computer (although that would involve significant economic cost). In fact, it's not that hard to calculate it to 14 significant figures. The achievement is finding a closed-form solution rather than an iterative numerical approximation.

† Or Tutankhaten, as we used to call him.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#95

Post by perlgeek »

Quequau wrote: post #18
chroem- wrote: post #4

Will this have any implications for astronomy?

From another comment in this thread: "The author’s have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries."

Note that "build" doesn't mean they built a physical telescope, they came up with lense shapes.

There are some serious problems when building large telescope lenses; if they get too heavy, they start to deform under their own weight, and non-spherical shapes are hard and expensive to produce.

It would be awesome if this analytical solution inspired improvement in real applications, but I'm cautions about that.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#97

Post by kodachi »

mykowebhn wrote: post #25

> After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!” > He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.…

I wonder that programming language he used. Many ideas are lost because we don't have something to write it on. That's the good thing about the so-called 'scripting languages' that IMO reduce the latency between idea and its materialization.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#98

Post by csomar »

mykowebhn wrote: post #25

> After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!” > He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.…

Brain was doing the computing so that he can eat more Nutella bread. Bummer, he just left the Nutella bread and went programming the solution.

Maybe it should have convinced him to procrastinate instead. Now, I know where all my inefficiency is coming from.

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#99

Post by MR4D »

What wenT unsaid wasn’t anything about expensive camera gear, but that phone thingy we hold in our pocket. THAT device will get much better at photography in very quick order, and the price change will be largely immaterial.

I fully believe this will be the death of all but professional cameras in 5 years or less. (Yes, I know cameras are already in sharp decline, but I’m talking true death - bankruptcies and firms leaving the market).

Re: Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem

#100

Post by ur-whale »

The fact that there is an analytical solution to the problem is a really nice achievement, but I have to wonder: solving this problem numerically has surely been within reach of computers for a long time, and should therefore have made actually manufacturing such lenses somewhat straightforward.

What am i missing?

Post reply on HN