Research Journal
April 25, 2007
The day for the poster celebration has finally come. I becoming really
nervous as I head towards my early morning classes. I haven't
participated in the poster celebration before so I don't know what it's going to be like.
It turns out that it wasn't that bad. Most of the people would just look at the demonstrations that we've set up and sometimes they
would ask you questions about what your project was about. Other times, they would ask you to explain what was happening. I actually met
somebody who told me how my project was related to what he was investigating on in the past.
April 24, 2007
The poster was finally done and ready for tomorrow's poster celebration. I have three demonstrations that go along with my poster: the
kaleidoscope, the christmas balls showing fractal reflections, and the angled mirrors.
April 21, 2007
Time to figure out what's going to be in the poster. I decided to have the
abstract and the "tiling" illustration to be in the poster. I might put
notes on angled mirrors on one of the sides but I still haven't figure out
what to put for the other side of the poster. I'm also trying to
investigate whether or not the paper I read about the number of images
formed between angled mirrors agrees with the results I would get using
the actual demonstration.
April 20, 2007
Reducing the reflections between angled mirrors into something that
resembles a tiling problem made it easier to analyze. John and I try to
use the spread sheet to actually create a graph that would show an
illustration of how the "tiling" problem works with angled
mirrors. Converting the equation of the line from rectangular to polar
coordinates makes the drawing the illustration easier.
April 18, 2007
I got the angled mirror demonstration ready for the poster celebration. I
also did a "mini" presentation with the HS WISE.
April 16, 2007
I cleaned the mirrors for the demonstration on the angled mirrors. I just
need the tape to fix the whole thing up. I also read a paper about the
number of images produced using angled mirrors. It summarized the number
of images using four simple rules. According to the paper, the number of
images is not totally independent to where the object is. It also depends
whether or not the object lies on the angle bisector.
April 11, 2007
With the abstract finally done, I have to concentrate on doing the actual
project. John and I are trying to investigate reflections on the angled
mirrors. My job is to see how another reflection appears and why the
extension of the mirror is equidistant to the reflection and the new image
that appears in the middle. We have to also prepare the other
demonstrations for the poster celebration and analyze them.
March 30, 2007
The abstract is finally done. Now, I would have to look at some of the
sample demonstrations. The demonstrations should be something that is
eye-catching and also something that I could explain.
March 26, 2007
The Abstract for the poster celebration is due today. For the project, I
would $ create and analyze demonstrations of Multiple Reflections. I
wanted to concentr$ on one topic instead of a real broad one. The topic
that I wanted to concentrat$ Fractal Reflections. I thought analyzing
Michael Berry's paper and other readin$ be sufficient enough to analyze
the Reflections on silvered globes. John says i$ more than that. Given the
amount of time that I have before the celebration, I $ have enough time to
actually understand the whole concept.
March 21, 2007
John sent me a message saying what things I might include for the
Abstract. The hard part would be writing what I would do/show on the
project. Also, explaining how the physics behind the law of reflection for
simple particles might be something interesting to add in. I think I would
be more comfortable with analyzing with ray trace models using geometry
than using a computer program but then again, the program would be a lot
easier to use. Interesting pictures from the computer program would also
be nice to add into the abstract.
March 19, 2006
John gave me a brief introduction about using matrices in optics. I
haven't learned much about matrices before so the topic is still a bit
confusing. I read a little about optical cavities too.
March 16, 2007
I read about the paper by Hector Covarrubias M. The paper is about
multiple reflections between two plane mirrors. One might expect that
once you shine a laser on one of the mirrors, the pattern produced
would be linear. Actually, it's not. At first glance, it would appear
as though it's a parabola. Accoring to Hector, it's actually a
hyperbola.
March 14, 2007
Happy Pi Day! As of now, I'm thinking of two possible topics for a
research project: Caustics and Multiple Reflections. The Multiple
Reflections topic seems to be more appealing at the moment. I feel as
though I would be better able to explain what is happening mathematically in a
topic related to Multiple Reflections than to that of Caustics. Topics
related to caustics are very deep. The math involved is much higher than
what I know so far. Somehow, it is still possible to explain it in simple
terms so I still want to keep that as an option.
Here are some examples of optical caustics.
- Rainbows
- Circles of Light - patterns from window reflections,
like these.
- Gravitational Lensing in astronomy
- Patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool
- Patterns from light refracted in wine glasses
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