Customer Reviews

Introduction to Statistical Optics (Dover Books on Physics)

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Paraphrasing J.W. Goodman in his Fourier Optics, E.L.O'Neill helped consummate the marriage between communication theory and optics.
This book is not an introduction. In under 200 pages, It covers geometrical, fourier and statistical optics without patiently deriving the formulae in small steps. It feels to me like a train ride over a long distance, with many stops where the conductor points at important scenes and tells good stories that I did not know before, even for the places I previously visited. For example, page 26-27 talks about contrast reversal in a most direct fashion in real space, much more elucidating than treatments in frequency space only.
The range of the topics in this book is close to 50% of combined (Warren Smith's Modern Optical Engineering + Joseph Goodman's Fourier Optics & Statistical Optics), the depth is about 80% of that combo, while the thickness is only 10%.

I came to this book with a good background in signal processing (communications) and math, but not so much in modern optics. The book really brought out the connections. I was able to quickly grasp a lot of the early part of the book, once I stepped up from 1 to 2 dimensions (no big deal). Later parts were sometimes over my head, but still interesting and worth reading. Often I'd just scan slowly, getting the sense of the equations or physics without worrying about proving every detail, then read the concluding paragraphs of a section in more detail and get some understanding. If you have a background like mine, this is a terrific book. Probably pretty good for others, too, but I can't promise that.

Really great book for seeing the forest without getting clobbered by the trees. I came to the book a practicing optical physicist. While I had seen all the pieces separately over the course of my education, I had never seen so much essential material presented so logically and so well. I find it light years more readable than Goodman, or Born and Wolf. O'Neill has the gift of being able to sense what is hard to swallow, and illuminating it like no other. I would elevate to an essential place on the shelf of any would be optiker of today. Would make an excellent senior undergraduate course, or gift for a beginning graduate student in optics.