I watched the optical gate thing yesterday, it made it seem much simpler than I had imagined.
Once you get past the weirdness that makes the light cross back and forth, you can abstract it away to separation at signal time. It makes it much easier to reason about.
somat 1 hours ago [-]
I have only ever seen fiber optics described in terms like "total internal reflectance" so it sort of blew my mind to consider them as waveguides for terahertz em fields, sort of obvious in hindsight, but most popular literature really appears to avoid thinking about light as a field preferring a photonic particle approach.
Which was one of many topics of that channel that also blew my mind, that photons might not exist, not as a particle anyhow, a photon(quantized amount of em field energy) is just how the em field interacts with matter. However because that is how we detect light, via it's interaction with matter, that interaction is probably the most important aspect. But it is totally possible to have sub-photonic levels of em-field.
arpadav 35 minutes ago [-]
funny ive been working on a much more rudimentary version of wave simulations just for fun, but mainly for rust/wgpu: https://wave.arpadvoros.com/
opem 3 hours ago [-]
Really cool software! Helpful for anyone getting into photonics
https://m.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics/videos
Once you get past the weirdness that makes the light cross back and forth, you can abstract it away to separation at signal time. It makes it much easier to reason about.
Which was one of many topics of that channel that also blew my mind, that photons might not exist, not as a particle anyhow, a photon(quantized amount of em field energy) is just how the em field interacts with matter. However because that is how we detect light, via it's interaction with matter, that interaction is probably the most important aspect. But it is totally possible to have sub-photonic levels of em-field.
I could build a 2D fluid simulator in a day by hand. Ask me to do the same in 3D and I need a team of five and 6 months.