Unit OPTIC AND MODERN PHYSICS
- Course
- Optics and optometry
- Study-unit Code
- A002463
- Location
- TERNI
- Curriculum
- Ottica avanzata
- Teacher
- Sergio Scopetta
- Teachers
-
- Sergio Scopetta
- Hours
- 42 ore - Sergio Scopetta
- CFU
- 6
- Course Regulation
- Coorte 2021
- Offered
- 2022/23
- Learning activities
- Caratterizzante
- Area
- Microfisico e della struttura della materia
- Academic discipline
- FIS/04
- Type of study-unit
- Obbligatorio (Required)
- Type of learning activities
- Attività formativa monodisciplinare
- Language of instruction
- ITALIAN
- Contents
- Impact of Optics in Twentieth Century Physics: relevance of concepts, techniques, experiments and measurements of Optics in the formulation and development of Quantum Mechanics and the theory of special and general Relativity. Impact of Optics in the Current Frontier Research in Fundamental Physics.
- Reference texts
- G. Gamow
Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory .
Additional material provided by the Teacher - Educational objectives
- The main objective of the course is to illustrate how some of the essential ideas of modern physics have developed around optics and how these ideas, in turn, needed optics to establish themselves. The student will become aware of the great importance, constant in the temporal development of Physics, of its discipline for fundamental research.
The main skills that the course aims to transmit are:
- know how to frame the acquired notions in a broad conceptual and historical context;
- knowing how to grasp the fundamental potential of discovery embedded into experiments, techniques, tools typical of the practice of Optics. - Prerequisites
- Arguments of the Physics courses of yhe first two years
- Teaching methods
- Face-to-face lectures; use of multimedia material
- Learning verification modality
- Oral exam
- Extended program
- Quantum Mechanics as Undulatory Mechanics.
Inteference and Diffraction at the heart of its formulation and of the concept of wave function. "Gedankenexperiment" and paradoxes. Interference in collisions of particles; the so-called optical theorems.
The role of optical experiments in the development of the Special Theory of Relativity.
Optical experiments to test General relativity: from 1917 to 2017.
Optics in fundamental Physics research nowadays.