OPTICS

Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behavior and properties of light, including its
interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually
describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic
wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves
exhibit similar properties.
HISTORY OF OPTICS
Optics began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The
earliest known lenses, made from polished crystal, often quartz, date from as early as 700 BC for
Assyrian lenses such as the Layard/Nimrud lens. The ancient Romans and Greeks filled glass
spheres with water to make lenses. These practical developments were followed by the
development of theories of light and vision by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers, and the
development of geometrical optics in the Greco-Roman world. The word optics comes from

The nature of light

The cause and effect relationship in vision
Despite its title, this chapter is far from your first look at light. That familiarity might seem like an
advantage, but most people have never thought carefully about light and vision. Even smart
people who have thought hard about vision have come up with incorrect ideas. The ancient
Greeks, Arabs and Chinese had theories of light and vision, all of which were mostly wrong, and
all of which were accepted for thousands of years.
One thing the ancients did get right is that there is a distinction between objects that emit light and
objects that don’t. When you see a leaf in the forest, it’s because three different objects are doing
their jobs: the leaf, the eye, and the sun. But luminous objects like the sun, a flame, or the filament
of a light bulb can be seen by the eye without the presence of a third object. Emission of light is
often, but not always, associated with heat. In modern times, we are familiar with a variety of
objects that glow without being heated, including fluorescent lights and glow-in-the-dark toys.
How do we see luminous objects? The Greek philosophers Pythagoras (b. ca. 560 BC) and
Empedocles of Acragas (b. ca. 492 BC), who unfortunately were very influential, claimed that
when you looked at a candle flame, the flame and your eye were both sending out some kind of
mysterious stuff, and when your eye’s stuff collided with the candle’s stuff, the candle would
become evident to your sense of sight.
Bizarre as the Greek “collision of stuff theory” might seem, it had a couple of good features. It
explained why both the candle and your eye had to be present for your sense of sight to function.
The theory could also easily be expanded to explain how we see nonluminous objects. If a leaf, for
instance, happened to be present at the site of the collision between your eye’s stuff and the
candle’s stuff, then the leaf would be stimulated to express its green nature, allowing you to
perceive it as green.
Modern people might feel uneasy about this theory, since it suggests that greenness exists only
for our seeing convenience, implying a human precedence over natural phenomena. Nowadays,
people would expect the cause and effect relationship in vision to be the other way around, with
the leaf doing something to our eye rather than our eye doing something to the leaf. But how can
you tell? The most common way of distinguishing cause from effect is to determine which
happened first, but the process of seeing seems to occur too quickly to determine the order in
which things happened. Certainly there is no obvious time lag between the moment when you
move your head and the moment when your reflection in the mirror moves.
Today, photography provides the simplest experimental evidence that nothing has to be emitted
from your eye and hit the leaf in order to make it “greenify.” A camera can take a picture of a leaf
even if there are no eyes anywhere nearby. Since the leaf appears green regardless of whether it
is being sensed by a camera, your eye, or an insect’s eye, it seems to make more sense to say
that the leaf’s greenness is the cause, and something happening in the camera or eye is the
effect.
(From light and matter)
Another issue that few people have considered is whether a candle’s flame simply affects your eye
directly, or whether it sends out light which then gets into your eye. Again, the rapidity of the effect
makes it difficult to tell what’s happening. If someone throws a rock at you, you can see the rock
on its way to your body, and you can tell that the person affected you by sending a material
substance your way, rather than just harming you directly with an arm motion, which would be
known as “action at a distance.” It is not easy to do a similar observation to see whether there is
some “stuff” that travels from the candle to your eye, or whether it is a case of action at a distance.
Newtonian physics includes both action at a distance (e.g., the earth’s gravitational force on a
falling object) and contact forces such as the normal force, which only allow distant objects to
exert forces on each other by shooting some substance across the space between them (e.g., a
garden hose spraying out water that exerts a force on a bush).
One piece of evidence that the candle sends out stuff that travels to your eye is that as in figure a,
intervening transparent substances can make the candle appear to be in the wrong location,
suggesting that light is a thing that can be bumped off course. Many people would dismiss this
kind of observation as an optical illusion, however. (Some optical illusions are purely neurological
or psychological effects, although some others, including this one, turn out to be caused by the
behavior of light itself.)
A more convincing way to decide in which category light belongs is to find out if it takes time to get
from the candle to your eye; in Newtonian physics, action at a distance is supposed to be
instantaneous. The fact that we speak casually today of “the speed of light” implies that at some
point in history, somebody succeeded in showing that light did not travel infinitely fast. Galileo
tried, and failed, to detect a finite speed for light, by arranging with a person in a distant tower to
signal back and forth with lanterns. Galileo uncovered his lantern, and when the other person saw
the light, he uncovered his lantern. Galileo was unable to measure any time lag that was
significant compared to the limitations of human reflexes.
The first person to prove that light’s speed was finite, and to determine it numerically, was Ole
Roemer, in a series of measurements around the year 1675.
The Speed of Light: Early Measurements
Light can travel through a vacuum
Many people are confused by the relationship between sound and light. Although we use different
organs to sense them, there are some similarities. For instance, both light and sound are typically
emitted in all directions by their sources. Musicians even use visual metaphors like “tone color,” or
“a bright timbre” to describe sound. One way to see that they are clearly different phenomena is to
note their very different velocities. Sure, both are pretty fast compared to a flying arrow or a
galloping horse, but as we have seen, the speed of light is so great as to appear instantaneous in
most situations. The speed of sound, however, can easily be observed just by watching a group of
schoolchildren a hundred feet away as they clap their hands to a song. There is an obvious delay
between when you see their palms come together and when you hear the clap.
The fundamental distinction between sound and light is that sound is an oscillation in air pressure,
so it requires air (or some other medium such as water) in which to travel. Today, we know that
outer space is a vacuum, so the fact that we get light from the sun, moon and stars clearly shows
that air is not necessary for the propagation of light.
Rays and Wavefronts
Deformed Waves Can Produce Images
Our model of waves has been so useful because it enables us to apply the same basic ideas to a
wide variety of phenomena; namely waves on ropes, sound waves, light waves and other types of
waves. In this chapter we will be dealing with waves that travel from one medium to another. In
such a case two things can happen: part of the wave can bounce back into the original medium
which we refer to as reflection, and part of the wave can travel into the next medium, a
transmission. When a wave travels into a new medium the wave is typically "bent" or deformed in
some way, a phenomenon we call refraction.
We can combine these effects of reflecting and bending waves to make the waves appear as if
they are being created at different locations than they actually are. If the waves in question are
light waves then this means that we see images at places distinct from where the objects
themselves are. While most of our examples will involve light waves, it is important to realize that
all types of waves will reflect and refract as they pass from one medium to another. (For
completeness we mention that there are two other methods by which the path of light can be
altered: absorption and scattering. We will not discuss these further.)
Representing a Wave with Wavefronts
So far we've pictured waves using only an oscillating sine functions. For one-dimensional waves
this was adequate, but for two- or higher dimensional waves this representation becomes difficult,
and so we introduce the idea of wavefronts and rays. Let us start by thinking of dropping a stone in
water and letting the ripples propagate outward. Some time later, the ripples appear as shown on
the figure below on the left. In this figure, parts of the wave are obscured by other waves and it is
generally difficult to draw and visualize interactions between waves like this.

These limitations make it a difficult to use representation, so we adopt a more useful

representation that omits a few details. One such representation is the wavefront representation in
which we choose to only draw one part of the waves. The figure above and on the right is a
wavefront representation of the picture on the left where we've chosen only to show the peaks of
the waves. Because we know the wave is oscillating up and down, and traveling outward, you
should have a reasonable idea of what the wave is doing just by looking at the picture of the
wavefronts.
Occasionally we shall draw wavefronts for the peaks and troughs in different colors so that we can
superpose them, recalling that peak-and-peak or trough-and-trough interference is constructive,
while peak-and-trough interference is destructive.
If the medium that the wave is propagating through is isotropic (i.e. behaves the same in all
locations) the wave will spread out at the same speed in all directions and the wavefronts will be
either concentric circles for 2-D waves or concentric spheres for 3-D waves. As the wavefronts
travel further from the source, they start to appear less curved. Far enough away, the wavefront
doesn't appear curved at all, like being on the edge of a giant circle. When we can approximate
waves as being flat we call them plane waves, because the wavefront of a 3-D wave (like sound)
resembles a plane at far distances. Plane waves are convenient because we can approximate that
the wave travels in one direction, which enables us to describe it using the harmonic wave
equation we developed.
Representing a Wave with Rays
We can simplify representing a wave in a different way; consider only the direction that a particular
piece of the wave is traveling. We can join these directions and trace out a path of a particular
piece of a wave. These paths are called rays, and are always perpendicular to the wavefronts.
Examples of rays are shown in the figure below as arrows.

Notice that we can draw whichever rays are convenient to use; in the above example, we drew
many rays going in all directions. On the right, we concentrated the rays in the part where we
discussed the wavefronts looking flat so we can discuss one more important quality of rays: when
you are a far distance from the source of the wave, the rays are approximately parallel. The extra
rays do not indicate that there is more energy in that part of the wave, or that this section is
particularly important. We are simply drawing those rays because they bring attention to the
phenomenon we wish to discuss. Throughout this section on optics we will select our rays to
illustrate the points we wish to make.
On the left we have drawn the individual wavefronts crossing, and on the right we have put C for
constructive interference and 0 for destructive interference. Both of these are easier to draw and
visualize than a picture of the wave that keeps all the wave's information (like the one below).

Overview of Geometric Optics

The Geometric Optics Approximation
Now that we have the concepts of rays and wavefronts we move on to the subject of geometric
optics. One approximation that geometric optics makes is that the waves (rays) travel in straight
lines until they hit a surface. When the ray encounters a surface it can either bounce back (reflect)
or bend (refract) but then continues to travel in a straight line. When is geometric optics
applicable? If a laser shined light onto a screen with two slits, as we understand it the light would
diffract, and we would see bright and dark fringes. But how can we imagine light as traveling in
straight lines when it can interfere like this? It is important to realize that the idea of the rays
traveling in straight lines is only valid if the wavelength of the wave (light) is much smaller than any
of the objects or slits the wave will encounter. If the slit in our diffraction problem is much greater
than the wavelength of incident light, then we can ignore the effects of diffraction. Mathematically,
the geometric optics approximation can be written as

where d is the size of any slit or object the light encounters and λ is the wavelength of the light.
Experiments show that when light interacts with an object several times larger than its wavelength,
it travels in straight lines and acts like a ray. Its wave characteristics are not pronounced in such
situations. Since the wavelength of visible light is less than a micron (a thousandth of a millimeter),
it acts like a ray in the many common situations in which it encounters objects larger than a
micron. For example, when visible light encounters anything large enough that we can observe it
with unaided eyes, such as a coin, it acts like a ray, with generally negligible wave characteristics.
How We See Things
Before going too much further it is worth considering how we see things. First, we must establish
that eyes only see light rays that fall into them. Next, consider a tree. The tree does not give off its
own visible light – we know this because we would not be able to see the tree at night time,
without any lights on. On a bright day we see the tree because the sun gives off light which hits
the tree and reflects off in many directions; some of it reaches our eyes.
The light that is reflected is not the same as the incident light – otherwise everything outside would
be the same color as the sun! Instead objects reflect certain colors preferentially, and absorb
others. The tree leaves, for example, reflect green strongly and absorb most of the other colors.
When sunlight (which is a combination of all the colors) falls on the tree, the green is strongly
reflected while colors like red are absorbed. Most of the light that reaches our eyes is green light,
this is why the tree appears green.
If we can “see” a particular point on the tree, it means some of the rays that reflected from that
point enter our eyes. The act of seeing only the top point of the tree is shown below on the left:

Here multiple rays have been drawn that enter the eye. Our diagram is not meant to suggest that a
disproportionate amount of light enters the eye from the top of the tree. We draw a higher density
of light rays in this region because we are more interested in light that reaches the eyes than what
happens to light going in other directions. If we look at the whole tree, then the picture on the left
can be drawn for every point on the tree that reflects light to our eyes. As shown on the right, all
points on the tree reflect light in many angles, so our eyes receive light from all points on the tree.
The phenomenon of light scattering in all directions when it hits an object is called diffuse
reflection.
Because multiple rays enter our eyes from different locations at slightly different angles, our brain
can judge how far away the top of the tree is from us. In doing this, our brain assumes that the
light rays traveled to us in a straight line. This approximation is the same as the one we made at
the beginning of this section.
Now consider an object that produces its own light rays, like a light bulb. It has rays going off in all
different directions, and we can see the light bulb if some of those rays enter our eyes. Our brain
tells us where the light bulb is by assuming that the light rays travel in straight lines.

For the purposes of figuring out where something is or how the light rays travel, it is not important
whether the object creates its own light or if it reflects light; in both cases the object has light
bouncing off it at all angles.
Images
These considerations about how we see things raise an interesting possibility. The only
information we have access to for sight is the light that reaches our eyes. If the light takes a bent
and twisted path to our eyes, then we will judge objects to be at different places, or to be different
sizes than they are. This is exactly what happens when we look in a mirror and see an image of
ourselves! Our study of optics is essentially the study of how light given off by objects (whether
this light is created by the object or simply reflected) can be manipulated into appearing like it
comes from somewhere else. We call this somewhere else an image. This is illustrated below.

Almost every image used in this section adopts the convention of using solid rays to represent real
light that actually exists, while using dotted rays to show light rays we imagine to exist. The dotted
rays are traced back to the image point by our brains, but the solid rays are the actual light rays
that we see. To locate where the image of a point is, trace the light rays back to where they
appear to originate from. To figure out the entire image of an object then we must find the image of
each point on the object individually.
There are three ways in which light can travel from a source to another location (Figure 9.2.1). It
can come directly from the source through empty space, such as from the Sun to Earth. Or light
can travel through various media, such as air and glass, to the observer. Light can also arrive after
being reflected, such as by a mirror. In all of these cases, we can model the path of light as a
straight line called a ray.

In all of these cases, we can model the path of light as straight lines. Light may change direction
when it encounters objects (such as a mirror) or in passing from one material to another (such as
in passing from air to glass), but it then continues in a straight line or as a ray. The word “ray”
comes from mathematics and here means a straight line that originates at some point. It is
acceptable to visualize light rays as laser rays. The ray model of light describes the path of light as
straight lines.
Since light moves in straight lines, changing directions when it interacts with materials, its path is
described by geometry and simple trigonometry. This part of optics, where the ray aspect of light
dominates, is therefore called geometric optics. Two laws govern how light changes direction
when it interacts with matter. These are the law of reflection, for situations in which light bounces
off matter, and the law of refraction, for situations in which light passes through matter. We will
examine more about each of these laws in upcoming sections of this chapter.
Interaction of light with matter
Absorption of light
The reason why the sun feels warm on your skin is that the sunlight is being absorbed, and the
light energy is being transformed into heat energy. The same happens with artificial light, so the
net result of leaving a light turned on is to heat the room. It doesn’t matter whether the source of
the light is hot, like the sun, a flame, or an incandescent light bulb, or cool, like a fluorescent bulb.
(If your house has electric heat, then there is absolutely no point in fastidiously turning off lights in
the winter; the lights will help to heat the house at the same dollar rate as the electric heater.)
This process of heating by absorption is entirely different from heating by thermal conduction, as
when an electric stove heats spaghetti sauce through a pan. Heat can only be conducted through
matter, but there is vacuum between us and the sun, or between us and the filament of an
incandescent bulb. Also, heat conduction can only transfer heat energy from a hotter object to a
colder one, but a cool fluorescent bulb is perfectly capable of heating something that had already
started out being warmer than the bulb itself.
How we see nonluminous objects
Not all the light energy that hits an object is transformed into heat. Some is reflected, and this
leads us to the question of how we see nonluminous objects. If you ask the average person how
we see a light bulb, the most likely answer is “The light bulb makes light, which hits our eyes.” But
if you ask how we see a book, they are likely to say “The bulb lights up the room, and that lets me
see the book.” All mention of light actually entering our eyes has mysteriously disappeared.
Most people would disagree if you told them that light was reflected from the book to the eye,
because they think of reflection as something that mirrors do, not something that a book does.
They associate reflection with the formation of a reflected image, which does not seem to appear
in a piece of paper.
Imagine that you are looking at your reflection in a nice smooth piece of aluminum foil, fresh off the
roll. You perceive a face, not a piece of metal. Perhaps you also see the bright reflection of a lamp
over your shoulder behind you. Now imagine that the foil is just a little bit less smooth. The
different parts of the image are now a little bit out of alignment with each other. Your brain can still
recognize a face and a lamp, but it’s a little scrambled, like a Picasso painting. Now suppose you
use a piece of aluminum foil that has been crumpled up and then flattened out again. The parts of
the image are so scrambled that you cannot recognize an image.
Instead, your brain tells you you’re looking at a rough, silvery
surface.
Mirror-like reflection at a specific angle is known as specular
reflection, and random reflection in many directions is called
diffuse reflection. Diffuse reflection is how we see nonluminous
objects. Specular reflection only allows us to see images of
objects other than the one doing the reflecting. In top part of
figure d, imagine that the rays of light are coming from the sun. If
you are looking down at the reflecting surface, there is no way for
your eye-brain system to tell that the rays are not really coming
from a sun down below you.
Figure f shows another example of how we can’t avoid
the conclusion that light bounces off of things other
than mirrors. The lamp is one I have in my house. It has
a bright bulb, housed in a completely opaque bowl-
shaped metal shade. The only way light can get out of
the lamp is by going up out of the top of the bowl. The
fact that I can read a book in the position shown in the
figure means that light must be bouncing off of the ceiling, then bouncing off of the book,
then finally getting to my eye.
This is where the shortcomings of the Greek theory of vision become glaringly obvious.
In the Greek theory, the light from the bulb and my mysterious “eye rays” are both supposed to
go to the book, where they collide, allowing me to see the book. But we now have a total of four
objects: lamp, eye, book, and ceiling. Where does the ceiling come in? Does it also send out its
own mysterious “ceiling rays,” contributing to a three-way collision at the book? That would just
be too bizarre to believe!
The differences among white, black, and the various shades of gray in between is a
matter of what percentage of the light they absorb and what percentage they reflect. That’s why
light-colored clothing is more comfortable in the summer, and light-colored upholstery in a car
stays cooler that dark upholstery.
Numerical measurement of the brightness of light
We have already seen that the physiological sensation of loudness relates to the
sound’s intensity (power per unit area), but is not directly proportional to it. If sound A has an
intensity of 1 nW/m2 , sound B is 10 nW/m2 , and sound C is 100 nW/m2 , then the increase in
loudness from B to C is perceived to be the same as the increase from A to B, not ten times
greater. That is, the sensation of loudness is logarithmic.
The same is true for the brightness of light. Brightness is related to power per unit area,
but the psychological relationship is a logarithmic one rather than a proportionality. For doing
physics, it’s the power per unit area that we’re interested in. The
relevant unit is W/m2 . One way to determine the brightness of light
is to measure the increase in temperature of a black object
exposed to the light. The light energy is being converted to heat
energy, and the amount of heat energy absorbed in a given
amount of time can be related to the power absorbed, using the
known heat capacity of the object. More practical devices for
measuring light intensity, such as the light meters built into some
cameras, are based on the conversion of light into electrical
energy, but these meters have to be calibrated somehow against heat measurements.
The ray model of light
Models of light
Note how I’ve been casually diagramming the motion of light with pictures showing light
rays as lines on the page. More formally, this is known as the ray model of light. The ray model of
light seems natural once we convince ourselves that light travels through space, and observe
phenomena like sunbeams coming through holes in clouds. Having already been introduced to
the concept of light as an electromagnetic wave, you know that the ray model is not the ultimate
truth about light, but the ray model is simpler, and in any case science always deals with models
of reality, not the ultimate nature of reality. The following table summarizes three models of light.

The ray model is a generic one. By using it we can discuss the path taken by the light,
without committing ourselves to any specific description of what it is that is moving along that
path. We will use the nice simple ray model for most of our treatment of optics, and with it we can
analyze a great many devices and phenomena. Not until chapter 32 will we concern ourselves
specifically with wave optics, although in the intervening chapters I will sometimes analyze the
same phenomenon using both the ray model and the wave model.
Geometric optics applies in cases where the dimensions of the objects (and apertures)
with which the light interacts are so large as to render diffraction effects negligible. In geometric
optics we treat light as being made up of an infinite set of narrow beams of light, called light rays,
or simply rays, traveling through vacuum or transparent media along straight line paths. Although
a light wave spreads as it moves away from its source, in geometric optics we can often
approximate its travel as being in a straight line; we did so for the light wave in Fig. 33-5a. So,
geometric optics is study of the properties of light waves under that approximation.
Note that the statements about the applicability of the various models are only rough
guides. For instance, wave interference effects are often detectable, if small, when light passes
around an obstacle that is quite a bit bigger than a wavelength. Also, the criterion for when we
need the particle model really has more to do with energy scales than distance scales, although
the two turn out to be related.
The alert reader may have noticed that the wave model is required at scales smaller
than a wavelength of light (on the order of a micrometer for visible light), and the particle model is
demanded on the atomic scale or lower (a typical atom being a nanometer or so in size). This
implies that at the smallest scales we need both the wave model and the particle model. They
appear incompatible, so how can we simultaneously use both? The answer is that they are not as
incompatible as they seem. Light is both a wave and a particle, but a full understanding of this
apparently nonsensical statement is a topic for chapter 34.
Geometric optics: The part of optics dealing with the ray aspect of light is called
geometric optics.

Ray diagrams
Without even knowing how to use the ray model to calculate anything numerically, we
can learn a great deal by drawing ray diagrams. For instance, if you want to understand how
eyeglasses help you to see in focus, a ray diagram is the right place to start. Many students
under-utilize ray diagrams in optics and instead rely on rote memorization or plugging into
formulas. The trouble with memorization and plug-ins is that they can obscure what’s really going
on, and it is easy to get them wrong. Often the best plan is to do a ray diagram first, then do a
numerical calculation, then check that your numerical results are in reasonable agreement with
what you expected from the ray diagram.

Figure j shows some guidelines for using ray diagrams effectively. The light rays bend
when they pass out through the surface of the water (a phenomenon that we’ll discuss in more
detail later). The rays appear to have come from a point above the goldfish’s actual location, an
effect that is familiar to people who have tried spearfishing.
• A stream of light is not really confined to a finite number of narrow lines. We just draw
it that way. In j/1, it has been necessary to choose a finite number of rays to draw (five), rather
than the theoretically infinite number of rays that will diverge from that point.
• There is a tendency to conceptualize rays incorrectly as objects. In his Optics, Newton
goes out of his way to caution the reader against this, saying that some people “consider ... the
refraction of ... rays to be the bending or breaking of them in their passing out of one medium into
another.” But a ray is a record of the path traveled by light, not a physical thing that can be bent
or broken.
• In theory, rays may continue infinitely far into the past and future, but we need to draw
lines of finite length. In j/1, a judicious choice has been made as to where to begin and end the
rays. There is no point in continuing the rays any farther than shown, because nothing new and
exciting is going to happen to them. There is also no good reason to start them earlier, before
being reflected by the fish, because the direction of the diffusely reflected rays is random anyway,
and unrelated to the direction of the original, incoming ray.
• When representing diffuse reflection in a ray diagram, many students have a mental
block against drawing many rays fanning out from the same point. Often, as in example j/2, the
problem is the misconception that light can only be reflected in one direction from one point.
• Another difficulty associated with diffuse reflection, example j/3, is the tendency to
think that in addition to drawing many rays coming out of one point, we should also be drawing
many rays coming from many points. In j/1, drawing many rays coming out of one point gives
useful information, telling us, for instance, that the fish can be seen from any angle. Drawing
many sets of rays, as in j/3, does not give us any more useful information, and just clutters up the
picture in this example. The only reason to draw sets of rays fanning out from more than one
point would be if different things were happening to the different sets.
Real and Virtual
Most people have no trouble understanding what a real object is or the distinction
between a real image and a virtual image. A virtual object, however, may take one by surprise –
so let’s look at all of them here

Figure II.2 shows a lens forming a real image of a real object, and I think it requires little
explanation. Light diverges from a real object and it converges to a real image. Real photons of
light depart from a real object, and real photons of light arrive at a real image.

Figure II.3 shows a lens forming a virtual image of a real object. As before, light diverges
from the real object, but no light converges to a real image. After refraction through the lens, the
light is diverging from a point where the photons have never visited. The light is diverging from a
virtual image.
Whereas you can project a real image on to a piece of card or a photographic film, you
cannot do this with a virtual image. The reason that you can see a real image with your eye is
that the additional optics of your eye bends the diverging light from the virtual image and makes it
converge on to a real image on your retina.

Figure II.4 illustrates what is meant by a virtual object. Light is coming from the left –
perhaps from a big lens beyond the left hand edge of the paper (or your computer screen). It is
converging to the point O, and, if the concave lens had not got in the way, it would have formed a
real image at O. However, as far as the concave lens of Figure II.3 is concerned, the point O to
which the light was converging before it reached the lens is a virtual object. No photons reach
that point. The lens bends the light, which eventually comes to a focus at a real image, I.
You will see that light converges to a real image or to a virtual object, and light diverges
from a real object or from a virtual image.
This is not a sign “convention”; it is just a statement of fact, or an explanation of what
are meant by “real object”, virtual object”, “real image” or “virtual image”.
Convergence
Figure II.5 shows a lens made of glass of refractive index 1.50. To the left of the lens is
air (refractive index 1.00). To the right of the lens is water (refractive index 1.33). A converging
beam of light is incident upon the lens directed toward a virtual object O that is 60 cm from the
lens. After refraction through the lens, the light converges to a real image I that is 20 cm from the
lens.
The convergence of the light at the moment when it is incident upon the lens is called
the initial convergence C1, and it is defined as follows:

The convergence of the light at the moment when it leaves the lens is called the final
convergence C2, and it is defined as follows:

Magnification
Magnification is, of course, defined as

The magnification can be calculated from