I was going to post more excerpts from Hiroshima, but like the blurb on the cover of my paperback copy of the book says (quoting a review from the Saturday Review of Literature), "Everyone able to read should read it." And if you read it a good while ago, I suggest re-reading it. I have dog-eared so many pages I'd be posting quotes from here to next week--okay that's beginning in a few hours, technically, so let's say from here to next month, at my current rate--if I excerpted passages from all the pages I marked. It's a slim book, even with the added 1985 chapter.
Another slim book, slim for a textbook at 200 pages, is one I bought recently through the auspices of Edward R. Hamilton bookseller, called Introduction to the Theory of Coherence and Polarization of Light. It's written by Emil Wolfe, and contains this as an epigraph for the first chapter: "...the image that will be formed in a photographic camera--i.e. the distribution of intensity on the sensitive layer--is present in an invisible, mysterious way in the aperture of the lens, where the intensity is equal at all points." The quote is from Frits Zernike's discussion of the concept of optical coherence in a lecture published in Proceedings of the Physical Society (London), Vol. 61, No. 158, 1948.
Wolf is rather well-known, partly for his research publications in optics and partly due to coauthoring two classic upper level physics textbooks: Principles of Optics (with Max Born) , and Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics (with Leonard Mandel). He is on the faculty at The Institute of Optics, U of Rochester. Here's what interests me mainly about the Intro book. In the preface, and also included in the info about the book in the ERH bookseller catalogue, there's a statement saying it has recently been discovered that coherence and polarization of light "are two aspects of statistical optics which are intimately related and can be treated in a unified manner." Recently means not long before the book was published in 2007. Exciting stuff!
Next, or at least sometime soon, we must discuss the idea of superposition in quantum mechanics, before getting back to the cat, the strangeness of which is due to the unavoidability of superposition of states in quantum theory.
