Holograms

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Term Paper Title	Holograms
# of Words	964
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.86

Holograms

Toss a pebble in a pond -see the
ripples? Now drop two pebbles close together.
Look at what happens when the two sets of
waves combine -you get a new wave! When a
crest and a trough meet, they cancel out and the
water goes flat. When two crests meet, they
produce one, bigger crest. When two troughs
collide, they make a single, deeper trough. Believe
it or not, you've just found a key to understanding
how a hologram works. But what do waves in a
pond have to do with those amazing three-
dimensional pictures? How do waves make a
hologram look like the real thing? It all starts with
light. Without it, you can't see. And much like the
ripples in a pond, light travels in waves. When you
look at, say, an apple, what you really see are the
waves of light reflected from it. Your two eyes
each see a slightly different view of the apple.
These different views tell you about the apple's
depth -its form and where it sits in relation to other
objects. Your brain processes this information so
that you see the apple, and the rest of the world, in
3-D. You can look around objects, too -if the
apple is blocking the view of an orange behind it,
you can just move your head to one side. The
apple seems to "move" out of the way so you can
see the orange or even the back of the apple. If
that seems a bit obvious, just try looking behind
something in a regular photograph! You can't,
because the photograph can't reproduce the
infinitely complicated waves of light reflected by
objects; the lens of a camera can only focus those
waves into a flat, 2-D image. But a hologram can
capture a 3-D image so lifelike that you can look
around the image of the apple to an orange in the
background -and it's all thanks to the special kind
of light waves produced by a laser. "Normal"
white light from the sun or a lightbulb is a
combination of every colour of light in the
spectrum -a mush of different waves that's useless
for holograms. But a laser shines light in a thin,
intense beam that's just one colour. That means
laser light waves are uniform and in step. When
two laser beams intersect, like two sets of ripples
meeting in a pond, they produce a single new
wave pattern: the hologram. Here's how it
happens: Light coming from a laser is split into two
beams, called the object beam and the reference
beam. Spread by lenses and bounced off a mirror,
the object beam hits the apple. Light waves reflect
from the apple towards a photographic film. The
reference beam heads straight to the fi...

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