ABERRATION

Introduction

"Nothing is perfect" is a content-free statement. It's an excuse

used over and over again to explain why things don't work out as
intended. It's an explanation that explains nothing. There's no
room in science for palliative blanket statements like this. Science
is not the pursuit of perfection. Perfection is a dumb concept to
begin with.

In optics, the deviation from perfection is called aberration. More

precisely, an aberration is a deviation of a ray from the behavior
predicted by the simplified rules of geometric optics. The primary
rule referred to here is the one that states that rays of light parallel
to the principal axis of a lens or curved mirror meet at a point
called the focus. If your only options for a statement are that it is
either true or false, then this statement is definitely false as are
many physical laws. If you can think beyond the law of the
excluded middle (which itself isn't a law, it's a fallacy) then you
can appreciate a real answer with more nuance.

For an ideal image-forming optical system there are two basic

expectations.

1. There is a one-to-one correspondence between points in the object

space and points in the image space that is, points map to points
not circles, ellipses or blobs. Aberrations of this sort result in images
that are described as blurry, fuzzy, or soft and edge details
accompanied by a glow or halo.
2. Straight lines in the object space correspond to straight lines in the
image space. Aberrations of this sort result in images that look
distorted.
Aberrations arise for one of two basic reasons.

1. Chromatic aberrations are caused by dispersion (the variation in the

index of refraction of a medium with frequency). Images with
noticeable chromatic aberration are typified by edge details with
noticeable colored halos.
2. Geometric aberrations are caused by geometry (the shape of the lens
or mirror). They are sometimes called monochromatic
aberrations because they occur even for images formed with light of
a single frequency. Images with noticeable geometric aberration are
typified by poor focus (the image looks fuzzy) or distortion (the
image turns straight lines into curves).

Chromatic aberration

Chromatic aberration comes in two types: axial and longitudinal.

To reduce chromatic aberration, a higher quality optical device
would use a special combination lens called
an achromatic lens or achromat for short. The simplest such system
consists of two lenses made of two different glasses: a
converging lens made of crown glass (the very common kind of
glass used in windows) and a diverging lens made of flint glass
(the slightly fancier kind of glass used in chandeliers and crystal
decanters). An apochromatic lens corrects for both chromatic and
spherical aberration.

The duochrome test also works for color blind subjects.

spherical aberration

history or his story

The Seventeenth Century English scientist, mathematician and
theologian Isaac Newtonwas interested in the history of optical
illusions. Is what we see there really there? To this end, he
experimented on himself in a way that should never be repeated.
When he was 24 years old, he inserted a bodkin (a blunt needle
used to thread ribbon through lace) deep into the socket between
his nose and eyeball.
Entry 58 from Newton's lab notebook described the one of these
experiments. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation rules were
not well established in the Seventeenth Century, so some of this
may look a bit odd to contemporary readers. Pen, ink, and paper
were all difficult to come by (Newton had his own recipe for ink), so
abbreviations were common as well. The letter "y" was often
substituted for "th" so that "the" is written ye , "that" is written yt,
and "them" is written ym.

58 I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & ye bone as neare

to ye backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with ye end of it
(soe as to make yecurvature a,bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall
white darke & coloured circles r,s,t, &c. Which circles were plainest
when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye bodkine, but if I held
my eye & ye bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye with it
yet ye circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed ym by
moving my eye or ye bodkin.
Pressing the side of the needle against his eyeball made colored
circles appear in his field of vision at a point opposite that of the
needle. These circles, which can be colored solid or take on
animated geometric patterns, are an example of a visual
phenomena known as a phosphene the sensation of light when
there is no light a mechanical phosphene in this case. Under
normal circumstances, when the eye is being used for its intended
purpose, light falls on the photoreceptor cells in the retina which
causes them to become excited (formally) or fire (colloquially). In
Newton's bodkin experiment, the photoreceptor cells were firing
because the were being squeezed from behind. (Newton really
wedged that thing deep into his eye socket according to his
account.)

To confirm that the visions he was seeing were not formed by

light, Newton repeated the experiment in a darkened room.

59 If ye experiment were done in a light roome so yt though my eyes

were shut some light would get through their lidds There appeared a
greate broade blewishdarke circle outmost (as ts), & wthin that another
light spot srs whose colour was much like yt in ye rest of ye eye as at k.
Within wch spot appeared still another blewspot r espetially if I pressed
my eye hard & wth a small pointed bodkin. & outmost at vt appeared a
verge of light.

Then he did something really dumb (as if sticking a needle into

your eye socket wasn't dumb enough). He stared at the sun
maybe. He was hopefully more sensible and stared at a bright
patch of the sun's light projected onto a wall. Staring at a bright
light source overstimulates the photoreceptor cells in the retina.
This reduces their sensitivity, which is a response that allows our
visual system to adapt to surroundings with different brightnesses.
When the bright source is removed, the overstimulated
photoreceptors are now under-sensitive (a word I just made up).
The human visual system is complicated, so there's a bit more to
it than that. Let's just say that staring at a bright light screws up
your eyesight for a while.
63 Looking on a very light object as ye Sun or his image reflected; for a
while after there would remaine an impression of colours in my eye: viz:
white objects looked red & soe did all objects in the light but if I went
into a dark roome ye Phantasmawas blew.
We would call this thing that Newton saw an afterimage, but at the
time that word did not exist and Newton was not the one to invent
it. Instead he used the word phantasma( in Greek) which
is a variation on the word phantasm or phantom in other words,
a ghost or at least something ghost-like. It's ingenious and
imaginative, but also a bit otherwordly.

The reason Newton did these experiments on himself wasn't

because he was some thick headed frat boy. Rather, he was
fascinated by the difference between objective reality and illusion
(or even delusion). One of the ways we can be fooled is in the
perception of color. Newton showed through a series of now
famous experiments using glass prisms that white light, which up
to that point was thought to be the purest form of light, is actually
a blended form of light with different colors.
7 Taking a Prisme, (whose angle fbd was about 60gr) into a Darke roome
into wch yesun shone only at one little round hole k, and laying it close
to ye hole k in such manner yt ye rays, being equally refracted at (n & h)
their going in & out of it, cast colours rstv on ye opposite wall. The
colours should have beene in a round circle were all ye rays alike
refracted, but their forme was oblong terminated at theire sides
r & s wth straight lines; theire breadth rs being 2 inches, theire length to
about 7 or eight inches, & ye centers of ye red & blew, (q & p) being
distant about 2 or 3 inches. The distance of ye wall trsv from ye Prisme
being 260 inches.

What Newton saw projected on the wall of his darkened

laboratory looked something like this.
Near the end of Entry 6 in his notebook, Newton called it a
"phantom".
And looking on it through the Prisme, it appeared broken in two twixt
the colours, the blew parte being nearer the Prisme than the red parte.
Soe that blew rays suffer a greater refraction than red ones. I call
those blew or red rays &c, which make the Phantome of such colours.
Six years later, when he described the prism experiment in
a public letter to the Royal Society, Newton had begun the
transition from the Greek loanword "phantasm" to the Latin
loanword "spectrum". This is the first written example of the word
spectrum with its current meaning.
Comparing the length of this coloured Spectrum with its breadth, I found
it about five times greater; a disproportion so extravagant, that it excited
me to a more then ordinary curiosity of examining, from whence it
might proceed.

He did not completely abandon the original word phantasm,

however.

But, to determine more absolutely, what Light is, after what manner
refracted, and by what modes or actions it produceth in our minds
the Phantasms of Colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle
conjectures with certainties.

Both words had similar meanings in the Seventeenth Century

something ghostly or not of this world. Much like spelling and
punctuation, scientific terminology wasn't systematized in the
Seventeenth Century. It may well have been seen as a mark of
proficiency to mix up spellings, punctuation placements, and word
choices. (This was about the time when the thesaurus was
invented after all.) In the Twenty-first Century, however, scientific
terminology is reasonably well organized and consistent and, for
unrelated reasons, the word spectrum has lost all its supernatural
connotations.

The spectrum that Newton first saw and then named is a colored
band of light produced when a source of mixed light has been
decomposed or broken up into components and sorted into a
characteristic sequence sorted by frequency, it was later
determined. It is a real thing and is not an optical illusion or
mental delusion.
Because Newton was a bit of a mystic and seven is a number
with mystical connotations, he divided the spectrum up into seven
named segments giving primary school children everywhere
something to memorize. He identified these as the "primary
colors" but later experiments have shown this notion to be wrong.
(Sorry primary school children.) The preferred term now is spectral
colors or prismatic colors for the things Newton was naming. (The
primary colors of red, green, and blue are discussed elsewhere in
this book.) There are also many more than seven distinguishable
colors of light in the visible spectrum a point Newton makes
clear near the end of this quotation.
red orange violet-purple

There are therefore two sorts of colours. The one original and simple,
the other compounded of these. The Original or primary colours are,
Red, Yellow, Green, blew , and a Violet-purple, together with Orange,
Indico, and an indefinite variety of Intermediate gradations.
Newton produced his spectrum by refraction (the change in
direction of a wave through a medium associated with changes in
the wave's speed) or more precisely dispersion (the variation of a
wave's speed in a medium with frequency). All transparent media
are dispersive to some degree. Therefore any optical system that
uses refraction to do what it needs to do will also experience
dispersion. If the goal of your optical system is to produce a
spectrum, then dispersion is a fine thing. If the goal of your optical
system is to produce a reliable image, to "see" something for what
it really is, then dispersion is a problem.

Maybe dispersion could be reversed. Newton tried a second

prism as a part of an "error correction" experiment. Disperse the
light with one prism then un-disperse it with a second to see if
there were any distortions caused by impurities or irregularities in
the glass.

Then I suspected, whether by any unevenness in the glass, or other

contingent irregularity, these colours might be thus dilated. And to try
this, I took another Prisme like the former, and so placed it, that the
light, passing through them both, might be refracted contrary ways, and
so by the latter returned into that course, from which the former had
diverted it. For, by this means I thought, the regulareffects of the first
Prisme would be destroyed by the second Prisme, but the irregular ones
more augmented, by the multiplicity of refractions. The event was, that
the light, which by the first Prisme was diffused into an oblong form,
was by the second reduced into an orbicular one with as much
regularity, as when it did not at all pass through them. So that, what ever
was the cause of that length, 'twas not any contingent irregularity.

Dispersion is a one way street. This realization caused Newton to

rethink his work in optics. No optical device would ever be able to
produce a "true" (for lack of a better word) image if it relied on
refraction. It would suffer from what we now call chromatic
aberration initially collinear rays of light would follow different
paths depending on their color. There would be no way for all the
colored rays of an image to be in focus together. Newton was
interested in astronomical telescopes at the time.

When I understood this, I left off my aforesaid Glass-works; for I saw,

that the perfection of Telescopes was hitherto limited, not so much for
want of glasses truly figured according to the prescriptions of Optick
Authors, (which all men have hitherto imagined,) as because that Light it
self is a Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible Rays. So that,
were a glass so exactly figured, as to collect any one sort of rays into one
point, it could not collect those also into the same point, which having
the same Incidence upon the same Medium are apt to suffer a different
refraction.

The way around this is to eliminate at least one of the lenses from
the telescope (the bigger lens, the one that faces the stars, the
objective lens) and replace it with a mirror.

[telescopes illustration]

All rays of light obey the law of reflection in the same way,
regardless of their color. Problem solved. Newton even
understood that the mirror needed to be ground and then polished
with a parabolic curvature to eliminate spherical aberration the
inability of a spherical surface to bring rays far from its axis into
proper focus. He most certainly didn't do this, however, as the
method of grinding a parabola is much more complicated that that
of grinding a sphere. (Optical devices with curved surfaces are
usually ground into the desired shape instead of being cast or
molded.)
This made me take Reflections into consideration, and finding them
regular, so that the Angle of Reflection of all sorts of Rays was equal to
their Angle of Incidence; I understood, that by their mediation Optick
instruments might be brought to any degree of perfection imaginable,
provided a Reflecting substance could be found, which would polish as
finely as Glass, and reflect as much light, as glass transmits, and the art
of communicating to it a Parabolick figure be also attained.

This was Newton at 30 reflecting back on thoughts he had when

he was 24. It took that long for the reflecting telescope to go from
concept to working prototype. (The bubonic plague didn't help
things much.)

Amidst these thoughts I was forced from Cambridge by the Intervening

Plague, and it was more then two years, before I proceeded further. But
then having thought on a tender way of polishing, proper for metall,
whereby, as I imagined, the figure also would be corrected to the last; I
began to try, what might be effected in this kind, and by degrees so far
perfected an Instrument (in the essential parts of it like that I sent
to London,) by which I could discern Jupiters 4 Concomitants, and
shewed them divers times to two others of my acquaintance. I could also
discern the Moon-like phase of Venus, but not very distinctly, nor
without some niceness in disposing the Instrument.
The reflecting telescope was a success. Not only did Newton
exhibit great theoretical insight when it came to optics, but he also
demonstrated that he could apply his theoretical knowledge to
practical applications. He was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal
Society that year. The prototype telescope he sent them is still in
their archives. It is the telescope more than anything else that
ushered Isaac Newton on to the public stage of Seventeenth
Century science more than his work on gravity, the laws of
motion, or the invention of calculus.