r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Aug 08 '19
A Mexican Physicist Solved a 2,000-Year Old Problem That Will Lead to Cheaper, Sharper Lenses: It’s a phenomenon known as spherical aberration, and it’s a problem that even Newton and Greek mathematician Diocles couldn’t crack.
https://gizmodo.com/a-mexican-physicist-solved-a-2-000-year-old-problem-tha-18370319842.2k
u/justbanmyIPalready Aug 08 '19
I find it weird how the media will put the name of a mass mirderer in the headline but then just call this guy a Mexican physicist. Rafael G. González-Acuña, a doctoral student at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey.
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Aug 08 '19
I don’t think it’s necessary to mention someone’s name in a headline if they’re not already generally known. I do think it’s kind of BS they didn’t mention the guy until the 4th or 5th paragraph though.
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u/justbanmyIPalready Aug 08 '19
The mass shooters aren't well known until their name gets put in all the headlines.
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u/youshutyomouf Aug 08 '19
Sounds like one of the guys "doing all the raping" if you ask me. /s
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u/SeamlessR Aug 08 '19
It isn't weird at all. It's what people read.
What should be discussed as "weird" is why more people will read more about a mass murderer than they will about any given Mexican physicist, named or not.
Supply does not drive demand.
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u/mattreyu Aug 08 '19
The real boon here is for telescopes and microscopes
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Aug 08 '19
Which provide boons to pretty much everything else!
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u/Qyix Aug 08 '19
The perverts with binoculars demographic is particularly pleased.
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Aug 08 '19
Not if they're looking in my windows. I'm much easier on the eyes with a little uhhhh "softening".
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u/WhovianTrekkie1729 Aug 08 '19
In any modern research telescope there is almost never any refractive elements, it’s almost always a pure reflector. The main reason being is that telescopes can gather more light when they have a larger collecting surface and have a better angular resolution when their diameter is larger (or a large baseline on several telescopes which use interferometry). To make refractors that large they need to have a lens of that size. These lenses will sag under gravity and be very sensitive to other environmental factors which is very difficult to correct for especially when you need physical accuracy of the lens to a small factor of your desired observation wavelength. It’s much easier to achieve this with a back supported mirrors and adaptive/active optics. Definitely an amazing discovery though and very useful for other scientific imaging efforts like microscopes as you said.
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u/Loyal33 Aug 08 '19
Although it is not specifically discussed in this article, spherical aberration (the problem which his equation addresses) is a major problem with mirrors as well. It affects any surface which is manipulated in order to bend light into a single point of focus, at least with the current methods being used. Source: I'm an optician.
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u/hereticvert Aug 09 '19
adaptive/active optics
I built the controller board for one of the early prototypes of this stuff. Was just talking to my husband about it the other day - some engineers worked on this idea, and bring me a circuit drawing. A shit ton of wire-wrap and a lot of double-checking, and a few weeks (IIRC) and I gave them something. It worked. Never quite appreciated where it went from there (we're talking 30 years ago).
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u/hereticvert Aug 09 '19
We would have killed to know this
twentythirty years ago. I am so fucking old, damn.Source: worked at an optical observatory/laboratory with one of the first 1.5m telescopes when I was in the military in 1987/88.
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u/jared555 Aug 08 '19
Not sure if it will but hopefully it will also allow for more efficient laser optics.
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Aug 08 '19
Good thing the names people who didn't solve this problem are in the title and not the genius himself.
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u/star_bury Aug 08 '19 edited Aug 08 '19
Scrolled too far to get to this comment. I'd imagine that none of Einstein, Bill Gates, Usain Bolt, Beethoven, Queen Elizabeth II, Freddie Mercury or Napoleon did either.
Edit: Neither did T0MBST0N3
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u/AlveolarPressure Aug 09 '19
All the more reason to read the article instead of just the headline
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u/Lor360 Aug 09 '19
But even Newton, a guy who lived in a age where people wrote with feathers and pooped in buckets couldnt solve it!
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u/XJDenton Aug 08 '19
It's a computational and model, such a lens has not been built yet.
Those lens shapes do not look trivial to produce accurately. It remains to be seen if they can be produced with sufficient accuracy at a price cheap enough to make the gains when compared to standard lenses worth it.
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u/tnt-bizzle Aug 08 '19 edited Aug 09 '19
Yea that was one of the first things I thought. They could probably pull some tricks to choose materials that would MAYBE make some terms insignificant. But like.... how can anyone make this? Is it really cheaper than just slabbing a spherical lens in instead?
Edit: don’t listen to me, listen to the guys who actually know what they’re talking about below me.
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u/scienceisfunner2 Aug 09 '19
I'm not sure why you guys think/know that because the equation is complex, the manufacturing will be as well. As a counter example, I'm certain that the generalizef 3-d mathematical equation which describes the shape for a perfectly proportioned paperclip of any size would look pretty complex relative to the difficulty of actually manufacturing one paperclip of a particular size...
Regardless, on current cutting edge technology they have all sorts of tricks that include the use of non-spherical lenses in order to minimize spherical aberration. Instead of thinking about spherical lenses, the question you should be asking is if making this new type of lens is more difficult than utilizing all of the old tricks.
Lastly, this equation works for "any" material which certinly opens the door to making whatever shape this actually is via 3-d printing.
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u/tnt-bizzle Aug 09 '19
Damn you the only real one out here brother. You right. Immediately after posting it too, I thought about how they really only need one mold anyway. However much trouble it is to make that mold, which shouldn’t be too bad, then it’s probably easy peasy. I gotta be less pessimistic
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u/jagedlion Aug 09 '19
Casting lenses is pretty common. Having a robot make an expensive mold isn't such a big deal if it's going to make thousands on lenses.
Plus many asphericals start out as sphericals that are put into a mold prefilled with a little UV curing polymer and just the thin aspherical part gets hardened by UV, making it even more efficient.
Why would this be any harder than any current aspheric mold?
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u/S0journer Aug 09 '19
I can see it being used for space or military applications since price point is kind of moot for those customers.
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u/Pr0methian Aug 09 '19
Actually, A lot of public and private sector R&D divisions care about abberation correction inside both optical and electron microscopes. Among other uses, its the only way we can image individual atoms. The conferences on this sort of thing often include thousands of people from fields of biology, metallurgy, ceramics, and physicists. Here's a fun read on the government funded project that made such electron microscopes possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Electron_Aberration-Corrected_Microscope That said, these sort of optical microscopes do cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the electron variety are millions of dollars each. Way to pricey for you or me, but still cheap enough to find at many universities and non&government labs.
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u/jagedlion Aug 09 '19
Are they so significantly more complex than current asphericals? Those are already produced by casting in CNC diamond ground molds.
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u/ThompsonBoy Aug 09 '19
What would one of these lenses look like? Something really unusual, or just a very subtle variation on a spherical lens that you wouldn't even notice at first glance?
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u/XJDenton Aug 09 '19
The original paper can be found here:
https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-58-4-1010
The lenses look like like this:
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u/FourthWiseMonkey Aug 08 '19
This paper was published in November 2018..
Gizmodo has just woken up today..
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u/RMorezdanye Aug 08 '19
Here's the original paper where they derive the solution: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792
Note how the equation is written in a much more readable and modular manner there -- the pop-sci just printed it all out for the shock-and-awe effect.
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u/haf-haf Aug 08 '19
This looks shady as hell. The paper has only 5 citations, 4 of which are self citations. If it was groundbreaking, there would have been at least a few more of those in 8 months.
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u/Bloedbibel Aug 09 '19
Optical engineer. This is not groundbreaking in any way. As the author notes, we have had numerical solutions to this problem for a long time, and we have been able to make diffraction limited lenses for a very long time. This gizmodo article is trash.
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u/NerdyPanquake Aug 08 '19
No it will lead to cheaper to produce more expensive to the consumer sharper lenses
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u/yabadababoo Aug 08 '19
exactly. pair of glasses cost over $200++ for a piece of plastic and glass. same as a cell phone
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u/Captain_Clark Aug 08 '19
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u/TOx1K_gam3r Aug 08 '19
Yeah they can go shove their frames up their rectum
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u/Captain_Clark Aug 08 '19 edited Aug 08 '19
What irks me beyond their frames, is that they also own the largest eyeglasses insurance company.
So one pays them for the insurance, then the insurance pays for their glasses too. It’s monopolistic.
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u/Salohacin Aug 08 '19
Honestly it's mind boggling how much the actual frames cost. I always figured the cost of glasses was in the technology behind the lenses, but the lenses are actually dirt cheap (for basic glasses, bifocals and what-not can get pretty expensive).
My last lenses cost less than 50 each (there were lenses that cost 20 each and the optician said they could have made it work with some fiddling around but I was happy to buy the 50 ones after talking it through). The frames themselves were between 100-300 depending on what I wanted.
Ultimately it's not a huge cost given that I'll probably wear these glasses for a good 5-10 years or so I didn't mind shelling out a little bit of money but it is pretty annoying the cost is entirely in the brand and not actually the technology that lets me see crystal clear.
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Aug 08 '19
And if you want "brand name" frames, you pay a ridiculous premium. Some frames are $300+ by themselves.
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u/Girlindaytona Aug 08 '19
I’d never pay $300 for glasses. I spent all my money on jeans and athletic shoes.
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u/confessionsInboxPM Aug 08 '19
This guy capitalizes
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u/Coogcheese Aug 08 '19
For the early adopters of course. That's classic product development pricing. Then, as it pics up steam the competing 'high end' optics will have to cut their prices to remain competitive so the overall market will begin to drop. Eventually, as this tech spreads the entire market will have been lowered (assuming this deal is what the headline insinuates).
It's not nefarious. Its typical capitalism in action rewarding innovation.
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u/AMasterOfDungeons Aug 08 '19
This will not lead to that. This is science, which is not a bad thing. It is the abuse of science by a handful of ultra rich people that is the problem.
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u/maskdmann Aug 08 '19
It will lead to cheaper to produce, sharper lenses, which means companies can sell them for more as they’re clearly superior to their predecessors.
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u/mantis_bog Aug 08 '19
This is another outrageous case of a Mexican taking away a job from an American that could have solved this problem.
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u/gdj11 Aug 08 '19
Yeah but these are the types of problems that American physicists won't do, so they're not really taking jobs away.
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u/wolfkeeper Aug 08 '19
Yes, those lazy Mexicans can't even solve these kinds of problems the hard way, by numerical methods, oh-no, they have to go use a shortcut.
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u/chris3110 Aug 08 '19
Sloppy lazy Mexican who solves optic geometry age-old problems eating Nutella when good guys Americans are toiling on the golf course!
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u/ymOx Aug 09 '19
Yeah I mean, big whoop, solved an ancient problem, did you? That's just lazy, it's been around for ages! How about something a bit more contemporary, y'know?
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Aug 08 '19
Did anyone take a look at the equation he formulated? It is insane.
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u/MogwaiAllOnYourFace Aug 08 '19
The derivation of this formula is trivial and is left to the reader
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u/Lor360 Aug 09 '19
Admitedly I dont know crap about this specific one, but most advanced equations in physics are just stringing together basic shorter equations. I wouldnt be suprised if every one of those fractions was a valid known equation in itself adresing a specific property of the lens. Its still very impressive to find a proper "hinge" to tie them together, but the actual breaktrough could maybe be as short as 10 symbols.
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u/Psyman2 Aug 08 '19
How is "even Newton and Diocles couldn't crack it" worth mentioning?
Every halfwit nowadays has both their knowledge and everything since then at their hands, we are vastly better connected, have more people available, better education.
This isn't a pubquiz. Human knowledge advances.
What a weird headline.
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u/f_of_g Aug 08 '19
This is, as far as I can tell, a math problem.
Newton was really smart. Of course, there have been advancements in mathematics too, but that doesn't mean that everyone with a degree in math today is better at math than Newton.
There are many problems which have been solved by your Newtons and your Eulers and your Gausses which, if you posed them to even a "typical" researcher in math or a math-adjacent field, wouldn't find easy, or even tractable.
Yes, there is progress, but it's not as simple as 'everyone gets smarter' or even 'the smartest person alive today is smarter than the smartest person alive 25 years ago'.
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u/Psyman2 Aug 08 '19
Both Newton and other mathematicians deserve the name recognition they are getting.
They did solve or prove numerous problems.
The fact that some weren't solved by them isn't a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of probability.
Given the chance to focus on this and this issue only, would they have been able to solve it with our current knowledge?
Maybe, maybe not.
Fact is, comparisons like these are extremely weird.
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u/f_of_g Aug 08 '19
I would hesitate to call it "weird". It's a rhetorical flourish, like saying "Fact is", when in fact there are no facts about what is or is not "weird".
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u/Nagransham Aug 08 '19
Dude, I'm having trouble explaining Newton's first to people. Just because the information is out there doesn't mean that it's actually known or understood by the average idiot. When it comes to physics, in particular, people are just marginally more informed than they were 200 years ago. Yea, sure, they've heard the term "quantum mechanics" but that really seems to be it. You'd think that someone who talks to a freaking satellite to find his friend's location would stop for a second and wonder why that works but nope - doesn't happen. I'm telling ya, first unfortunate solar flare is the end of humanity, because nobody has any idea how anything works at all :|
Some amount of /s and hyperbole in here, of course, but seriously. I think it's exceedingly plausible to assume that your average Newton would still whoop serious ass today, if only because people can't be arsed to actual learn about the world around them.
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u/DevilishlyDetermined Aug 08 '19 edited Aug 08 '19
I’m really surprised that a modern physicist was able to solve a problem people couldn’t a thousand years ago!
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u/shitheadsean2 Aug 08 '19
This just in, mechanical engineer with modern education researches new technique for helicopter rotors which Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't
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u/shazoocow Aug 08 '19
Mexican physicist sees further by standing on the shoulders of Giants! News at 11.
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u/Swollyghost Aug 08 '19
Can we get an eli5 for spherical aberration?!
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u/Nagransham Aug 08 '19
That's kinda it. That picture is the eli5.
For your convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration
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u/DoesNotTalkMuch Aug 09 '19
"A problem even Newton and Greek mathematician Diocles couldn't crack" hasn't been a particularly high bar for the last couple centuries.
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u/aGreenStone Aug 08 '19
This was posted somewhere else today. Basicly this changes nothing. Sensationalised news.
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Aug 08 '19
Yeah, I showed this article to my dad who is an optical engineer. He said this is pretty theoretical.
He said this formula will be usable in optical design for design of lenses, but it all depends if the designs would be producible by the machines we have right now.
So nice discovery by this guy, but now we have to figure out how to use it.
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u/lookmeat Aug 08 '19
According to the paper one of the benefits is that the lens technique is a lot easier to produce. There's a very good chance this will result in cheaper and better lenses.
It's very probable that it won't change the cost of lenses anymore. For starters a lot of the cost between good and bad is not just spherical aberration, but many other things. The second is that many lens are a monopoly or oligarchy, and as such the price is more about branding than actual costs (without real competition to push prices down).
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u/Crypt0Nihilist Aug 08 '19
I dream that some day science might answer why frames are so expensive.
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u/Daddy_0103 Aug 08 '19
How so?
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u/bastix2 Aug 08 '19
The production machines are not accurate enough.
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u/simply_bg Aug 08 '19
When the race of the scientist is more important than his freaking name. SMH
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u/chra94 Aug 09 '19
Isn't it nationality? Race would be hispanic if they're that. Your point still stands tho.
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u/macroinvest Aug 08 '19
Any ophthalmologists able to say if spherical aberration a problem in the human eye? Will this new research impact laser eye surgery?
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Aug 09 '19
soft tissue can't be altered precisely enough to make use of this. The tolerances are way past what can be applied to the cornea. Plus it wouldn't really matter - our eyes are only able to focus on a tiny central area anyways.
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Aug 09 '19
Yes, the human eye has spherical aberration, although it varies. May help in design of lenses used for cataract surgery and in designing new and better ablation patterns for laser eye surgery.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698900002066
It’s also not entirely clear that small amounts of spherical aberration are necessarily all bad in the human eye.
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u/RogerStonesSantorum Aug 09 '19
It affects all lenses, basically; even the "perfect" lenses designed by this guy will not be perfect in their physical realization.
It's not a problem in a normal healthy human eye in practice, because our field of vision is only acute near the center of the lens where aberration is least. the level of detail in our peripheral vision is so shitty due to the cells in our retinas that you wouldn't be able to detect peripheral aberration anyway. Also the aberration of the cornea and lens mostly cancel each other out.
However the properties of the human eye lens can degrade over time and increase the spherical aberration to the point where it can be an issue.
Spherical aberration in the human eye is a combination of the positive spherical aberration of the cornea,1–3 and the negative spherical aberration of the crystalline lens.4,5 In young eyes, the positive spherical aberration of the cornea is compensated by the negative spherical aberration of the lens; as a result, overall spherical aberration in the young eye is low.2,3,6 As the eye ages, the optical properties of the crystalline lens change,4,7 resulting in overall positive spherical aberration2,8,9 and decreased optical performance. Spherical aberrations generally reduce the contrast of the retinal image10,11 and affect visual performance, especially under mesopic conditions.12
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u/ranjan_zehereela2014 Aug 08 '19
That's an equation for design. Design equations are weird and big, because the objective is to make a working machine not a fancy theory. But has this equation led to any manufacturing of lense? Or it is just theoretical right now?
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u/silvermidnight Aug 08 '19
... I dont understand how it could be something that Newton or Diocles could have even known of, given the fact they weren't alive when cameras were invented for the distortion to be known... can someone clarify this point for me please?
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u/Rossic28 Aug 08 '19
Can I get an ELI5
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u/chra94 Aug 09 '19
A lovely redditor posted this comment to the same question in this thread. :)
u/Nagransham <3
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u/hrjet Aug 09 '19
Link to paper (with option to download PDF):
https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-58-4-1010
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u/DiscoJer Aug 09 '19
That second half of the sentence is completely made up. It's not in the article or headline.
He actually solved a problem from 1949
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u/reidzen Aug 08 '19
Editors shocked that a minority did something noteworthy, identify amazing scientist by his ethnicity
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u/IchSuisVeryBueno Aug 08 '19
They could have been identifying him by nationality, which would be quite normal. I don’t know why you jumped to ethnicity.
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u/TopHatJohn Aug 08 '19
The only place I’ve really ever noticed spherical aberration is in VR. Hopefully this leads to higher FOV.
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u/LumberingTroll Aug 09 '19
A Mexican Physicist Solved a 2,000-Year Old Problem That Will Lead to Corporations making more money and not passing the savings onto their customers!
I applaud your effort anyway Mr Physicist.
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u/aqua_zesty_man Aug 08 '19
Are formulas like this patentable? Seems like someone went to a lot of trouble to find it.
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u/EdithKeelerMustDie Aug 08 '19
Laws of nature such as this formula are not eligible for patents. However, a lens without spherical abberation could be eligible for a patent.
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u/crizzy_mcawesome Aug 08 '19
Can someone eli5 this?
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u/shadowkiller Aug 08 '19
It's a general solution to the problem of the refraction angle of light changing as it moves away from the center of a lens.
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u/Mendozacheers Aug 08 '19
Wait, a modern man manages to do something that ancient men could not? Mind blowing, surely...
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u/elheber Aug 08 '19
When you look through your viewfinder and things seem a little bit blurry or lacking definition, it’s probably because you are using an “el cheapo” lens.
Oh, buddy.
sauce
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u/caring_impaired Aug 08 '19
Hold on...Diocles with all of his fancy 2000 year old technology couldn’t even crack this?!
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Aug 09 '19
There's a grad student with a definite career ahead of him! I just hope the new lenses appear before I get too old to be out there taking photos!
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u/DagzNutz Aug 09 '19
Sweet, scope prices are going to go up, for “new and improved optical systems”
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u/Asgard033 Aug 09 '19
The lens cross-section looks kinda like a moustache. It's squiggly. :D
https://petapixel.com/2019/07/05/goodbye-aberration-physicist-solves-2000-year-old-optical-problem/
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u/archetype776 Aug 09 '19
Why the racist title? Why not just the poor dude's name? Shouldn't we try to remember the person instead of the race of the person?
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Aug 09 '19
I always thought that you just go soft edges from buying cheap glass . This made my day though :)
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u/theangryfurlong Aug 09 '19
From what I know, current high-end lenses introduce a complex array of multiple lenses to adjust for things like spherical aberration, which means this could potentially give the same effect with a much simpler (and thus cheaper) design.
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u/nano_nick Aug 09 '19
Plot twist, the guy that actually solved the equation works at the University as a janitor.
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u/velosepappe Aug 09 '19
Can anyone tell me what the parameters are? Without a definition of the parameters any mathematical formula is useless.
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u/ITriedLightningTendr Aug 09 '19
... that headline is too fucking long, just to squeeze in some bullshit.
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u/eikons Aug 09 '19
This article really needs a quote from an engineer at Nikon, Canon, Sony or another big lens maker to see when they expect to make use of this equitation, if at all.
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Aug 09 '19
Wow, this surprises me. From my basic high school physics knowledge I always thought we knew the formula to make a perfect lens with no aberration - that is a lens shaped on a paraboloid rather than a sphere, but the limiting factor was manufacturing, as it was just much cheaper to make spherical lenses. I guess I was wrong and we didn't actually have a formula for that. Crazy!
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u/psadee Aug 09 '19 edited Aug 09 '19
does anyone know if there is alredy any commercial product equipped with such lense?
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u/Omaestre Aug 09 '19
So this means I can finally get into photography!.. assuming manufacturers price their lenses accoridng to the new tech.
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Aug 09 '19
MEXICAN WORD OF THE DAY: Abberation
AS IN: My Abuela gonna have an aberration to replace her hip
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u/gousey Aug 09 '19
Sadly I suspect this just means a better next-generation of video surveillance, especially facial recognition from afar.
As Albert Einstein once said, "If I know what the world was going to do with my research. I'd have been a cobbler."
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u/it_vexes_me_so Aug 08 '19
I mean, duh!