Customer Reviews

Holography Handbook: Making Holograms the Easy Way

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The authors explain, with numerous photos, how to set up a 4'x4'x1' sandbox table, full of 1600 pounds of sand, all "floating" on partially inflated inner tubes for making your own holograms. That way, when the garbage truck goes past the house, no vibrations will disrupt the inertial stability of your optics lab. And you can put the lenses and mirrors on long sticks and just push them into the sandbox! This is a real how-to manual, with numerous practical tips for setting up lasers, mirrors, shutters, exposure meters, timers, viewing objects, and the hologram-capturing film that will become your own holograms, if you follow the steps and invest about $1000.

Where to buy lasers? How does it all work? How do I set up the tabletop? This is a lab manual that doesn't subject us to much optics math, but rather inspires us to marvel, and guides us with easy to follow sketches to find personal and expansive philosophical answers, without really telling us what we'! ! ll find when we have so followed. There is a even section on "the holographic brain", "holocosmology" and other artistic and philosophic excursions.

Wonderful photos show Dr. Dennis Gabor who conceived of a hologram in 1948, while working on the electron microscope, 13 years before the laser was invented. One shows him accepting the Nobel Prize. He looks a little like Salvador Dali.

This book could perhaps be the basis for a "hologram merit badge" for, say, a group of kids from ages 9-13, let by an adult who needs an excuse to actually set this all up. Laser safety is explained, too.

"These are the early days of holography," the author muses in the preface, "we might compare ourselves to photographers working prior to 1860....We welcome you, as a fellow pioneer, to join in the excitement of being involved in it from the beginning."

And you won't need much more than this book to delve deeply into this wizardry, either. W! ! ell, ok, the sand.

The idea of using a sand table for home holography keeps appearing over and over. As any optician knows, sand and grit are what are used to grind glasses, and they're also what cause people to buy new ones.

A sand-based optical bench sounds like a great (read "cheap") idea, but it's simply impossible to get rid of the floating grit. Even if it's later sealed up, pouring the sand gets grit all over. It only takes one tiny speck to throw Newton's rings all over a setup. OK, that's relatively harmless (unsightly, but harmless), but it could equally well get into and ruin a spatial filter.

I found the theory section of this book hard to follow, despite several degrees in engineering.

This is by no means a bad book. It has much useful information. Go to the library and borrow this one, then make use of the good parts. But buy Iovine's excellent book "Homemade Holograms" instead.

I bought this book when I was 14 years old, built the vibration isolation sandbox table, put together PVC mounts for basic optics and mirrors I bought and literally made reflection holograms in the bedroom of my parents house using this book, developing plates in the bathroom sink with all windows blocked out. I futher went on to make more advanced multi-beam, transmission holograms using advanced equipment. Not sure how up to date the sources for equipment and materials are, for that was 25 years ago. But everything you need to know to get started in holography is contained in this book and its conveys the information in a simple, straight forward manner that almost anybody can use. The authors did a terrific job. Highly recommended.