Diffuse scattering and physical optics in the propagation of electromagnetic waves applied to mobile communications

In this work, the optical theory of physics helps to understand, analyze, and calculate the received power in a fifth-generation mobile telecommunications receiver. In these communication systems there are statistical models and deterministic physical models. We investigated how diffuse scattering in reflection contributes to specular reflection in received power at a receiver due to materials in the propagating environment in a communication channel using millimeter waves. The dimensions of building construction materials have sizes comparable to wavelength at millimeter wave frequencies. The power transmitted by communication equipment can be reflected in the roughness of these apparently smooth materials or spread out in multiple directions. The results show that the contribution due to diffuse scattering must be considered and that deterministic physical models using optical theory are valid and improve predictive analysis with good fit. With these results, the physical theory allows to make software with high precision and that improves the current applications.

Re-envisioning the Evil Eye: Magic, Optical Theory, and Modern Supernaturalism in Jewish Thought

This essay is a case study in the modern emergence of the “supernatural.” I argue that pre-modern understandings of the evil eye were predominantly naturalistic, based on extramissionist, haptic concepts of vision. The need to believe in the evil eye first arises when sight becomes universally understood as the result of light entering rather than emerging from the eyes. In the Jewish context, rabbis then begin to develop alternative explanations for its existence and efficacy. These novel etiologies were, for the first time, supernatural. Furthermore, an under-appreciated consequence of the emergence of the modern category of the supernatural is here revealed: rather than signifying the opprobrium of rejected knowledge, for certain religious communities, its embrace has come to represent spiritual conviction.

A Series of Fortunate Events: Harold Hopkins

Harold Hopkins is known to most urologists for his innovations in the field of endourology: fibreoptics which led to the flexible cystoscopes and ureteroscopes and the rod lens system that revolutionised rigid cystoscopy and endourological surgery. Of course these inventions have benefitted many other areas of medicine such as gynaecology, orthopaedics and gastroenterology. Harold Hopkins however was an optical physicist; his genius was not limited to medical devices. Indeed he could quite easily have concentrated his skills in theoretical physics, optical theory or applied it to optics and lenses in industry. In fact, he could have become an expert linguist eschewing science altogether. As a matter of fact Hopkins did all of these things but it was a series of coincidences that led him to pursue the path of optics and that brought him together with certain doctors in need of a genius with the ability to see novel approaches to their problems.

Shakespeare’s Alhazen: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the History of Optics

Also exploring Shakespeare’s borrowings, Anne-Valérie Dulac turns to optics and takes Love’s Labour’s Lost as her departure point. She first reminds us that in her Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost, published in 1936, Frances Yates repeatedly mentions the importance of Ahazen’s optical theory in grasping the play’s many references to light, eyes, and vision. Dulac first deals with two mistakes made by Yates in her rather short description of the 1572 edition of the Opticae Thesaurus, a compendium including a truncated Latin version of Alhazen’s treatise along with Witelo’s Perspectiva. She then demonstrates that this was due to the fact that, at the time when Yates was writing, historians of science had not yet shown as forcefully how different the translations of the Kitab al-Manazir (The Books of Optics) are, or, in other words, how different Alhazen is from Alhacen and Ibn al-Haytham. Dulac eventually looks into the Latinised version of Alhazen’s optical theory to enquire into whether it could shed light on some of the most intricate metaphorical networks of the play.