At the recent conference on Optics in Education in Deift, I presented a paper' where I claimed that a new formulation of scalar diffraction based on an angular representation was simpler, more accurate and easier to teach than the classical manner based on various approximations of the spatial distribution. To my surprise, the presentation generated a storm of protest by some participants in the congress, who claimed that my results were wrong and my derivation invalid. Although my results were not wrong, it is true that the demonstrations were more intuitive than rigorous. Since that time, I have reexamined my results and found that I can put them in a rigorous form by means of some relatively elementary quantum and relativistic properties of light

Date Published: 19 July 1999
PDF: 2 pages
Proc. SPIE 3749, 18th Congress of the International Commission for Optics, (19 July 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.354934

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3749:
18th Congress of the International Commission for Optics
Alexander J. Glass; Joseph W. Goodman; Milton Chang; Arthur H. Guenther; Toshimitsu Asakura, Editor(s)