A Chapter from my book 'Basic Optics: Principles and Concepts'

 



[This book is published by Elsevier. It is an exhaustive survey of basic concepts of Optics, and is modern in approach. It captures the essential charm of physics.]


Click here to read the chapter on the foundations of ray optics.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inference Belief and Interpretation in Science

Image
INFERENCE  BELIEF  AND  INTERPRETATION  IN  SCIENCE This monograph of mine inquires into the deeply cognitive roots of human scientific  quest.  The process  of   making  scientific inferences is continuous with the day-to-day inferential activity of individuals,  and  is  predominantly inductive in nature.   Inductive inference, which is fallible, exploratory, and open- ended,   is  of essential relevance  in our incessant efforts at making sense of a complex and uncertain  world  around us,  and covers a vast range of cognitive activities, among which scientific exploration  constitutes the pinnacle. Inductive inference has a personal aspect to it, being rooted in the cognitive unconscious of  individuals, which has recently been found to be of paramount importance in a wide range of  complex cognitive processes. One other major aspect of the process of inferenc...
Read more

Read my Bengali article on Philosophy of Mathematics

Starting from the work of Gottlob Frege and the success and failure of the logicist trend in the philosophy of mathematics, and then having a brief look at Zermelo-Frenkel set theory, I address a few basic issues in Mathematical Realism , also termed Platonism in mathematics. While prominent names in mathematics are known to have adopted the Platonist position, the latter is not free of problems of interpretation rooted deeply in our view of what mathematical truth is all about. I then counterpose the intuitionist view of mathematics against the Platonist view and briefly outline David Hilbert's project of looking for the consistency of Mathematics, aiming to reconcile the finitary approach with the Platonist point of view. This also engendered the possibility of a resolution between the realist and the intuitionist points of view, but that possibility was thwarted to a considerable extent by Goedel's incompleteness theorems. This leads to the position that different trends i...
Read more

সত্য-অন্বেষণ: সত্য কী? সত্য কোথায়?

  সত্যের ধারণাটি মোটেই সরল বা সহজ নয়। সত্য কি শুধুই বিষয়-নির্ভর? আমরা কি সত্য আবিষ্কার করি, না কি তা অংশত নির্মাণও করি? আমাদের অধিবিদ্যার (metaphysics) সঙ্গে সত্যের সম্পর্ক। সত্যের ধারণা প্রসঙ্গে কান্টীয় অধিবিদ্যার স্বভাববাদী ভাষ্য কী বলে?  click here to read
Read more