这儿有更绝妙的回答。(http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserioi.htm#ioilhu6)
;Rs.rl>;t/ ka8$d fC So You Think You Want to be an Optical (or Laser) Engineer
XJ O[[G` OK, this really is more about optics than lasers but it was too good to pass up!
_hWuAJ9Qy (From: Jim Klein (
kdpoptics@kdpoptics.com).)
3l$E8?[Zwi ",QYDFFeF If you possess any or all of the following characteristics, you can become an optical designer:
d~sJ=) X'xUwT|_+ A`IHP{aB You are too honest to become a project manager.
HS(U4 e|JIrOnc You are too smart to become a line (people) manager.
W oWBs)E blUY.{NN3 You are not handy with lab equipment and tend to drop hardware and burn yourself with soldering irons and glue your fingers together with crazy glue.
aj?2jU~ Pq 9lKRL'QR You really understand the optical invariant and pupil imagery.
Y}S.37|+^ w"BIv9N You like computers and software more than people and social interaction.
*.:! Ax If you become an optical designer be ready for some or all of the following:
}\>+H }#&~w 0 P @K7ebYr? Anyone who buys ZEMAX will think that makes them smarter than you, even if it is the company janitor and even if you use ZEMAX as well.
]W+)ee|D El {r$-} Your boss reminds you in meetings to use all the spheres you can cause they're cheaper than those pesky conics and aspheres in the TMAs you design. (this actually happened last Friday).
> n1h ^AW Shs')Zs bv The system engineer has you explain simple optical principles over and over again and then keeps asking you why JOE DOTES at the XYZ company had no problem with the design, forgetting that you're working at F/2 with a 80 degree FOV at 0.3 microns and his design was running at F/10 with a 0.025 degree FOV at 20 microns. (this happened on Thursday)
@`5QG2 VZHr-z$6n Your Boss is always asking you, at budget time, if you "really" need that ray tracing program user support. (this happens every year in November).
g %ZdIKj! ?vMK'" Your boss and your system engineer are both convinced that they are way smarter than you are because they can't believe you understand principles in optics which just give them headaches and make them cry.
"oHp.$+K /9P^{ OZ;y You'll be the last to be promoted and the first guy on the lay off list.
::v;)VdX+* b/z'`?[ If your boss saw it work on Star Trek, you should be able to design it in an hour.
re]%f"v:5 (From: Mark W. Lund (
mlund@moxtek.com).)
1k$2LQ lK "' n LL W8< @sq~I I had a boss once who told me that optical engineers are too inflexible, so he was going to have the EEs do the optical engineering, and by the way you aren't going to get a raise for two years (two days later I got a 15% raise by moving to another company).
JR] )xPI` ~KJ,SLzhx9 Your boss will expect you to be an expert in sources, detectors, fibers, lens design, infrared, UV, visible, diffraction limited, visual, and light bucket systems, while at the same time having teams of EEs who specialize in only power supplies, or antennas, or digital or analog.
ZT r:xX{R6 K!9y+%01 You will be allocated the last remaining space in the box, and told to make it fit (use mirrors, I was told).
h|K\z{ A yq1Gqbh
l I was once on a missile project where the mechanical engineer was tasked to design an infrared window that would stand the multi-mach stresses. Three times he came to me with the same solution: stainless steel meets the specification.
G aha Z
F p@vpd Memorize a dialog explaining how you can't focus the light from a 60 watt light bulb into a 10 micron spot to burn holes in the table. You will need this once a week for your entire career.
AbL5 !' @ <|6{N< Be prepared to have fun using the most wonderful engineering substance in the universe: light.
:wF b5 " (From: Steve Roberts (
osteven@akrobiz.com).)
e jP,29 1]"D %U= )uANmThOz They also KNOW that 1 watt of laser light does the effective work of many kilowatts. It, according to their physics, has to propagate as perfectly parallel beam with no losses and is immune from the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore, all supervisors who have read the high school level laser text and are thus experts think you should be fired when they cant understand why you tell them their proposed 40 W CO2 laser is not a good choice to heat a 10 cm diameter spot on a chunk of thick aluminum plate to 1,000 Degrees F in 1 second or less from 400 feet away in open air using just a simple 2 inch lens. Happened last Wednesday. :)
Rk}\)r\ (From: Anonymous (
localnet1@yahoo.com).)
2TE\4j G!n l'5|y [SK2 x4 Don't forget the fun you can have working on a large frame ion laser, with the cover open, on a nice WELL grounded scaffold, when you spring a leak in your cooling lines? Nothing like 500 or 600 VDC at 40 A to lighten up one's day! (Oh yeah. I forgot to mention... The gig you were paid $10K to perform, in front of the heads of a major corporation is set to go on in less than 4 minutes.) Happened about a year ago to a friend of mine.
ur?d6 a (From: William Buchman (
billyfish@aol.com).)
SRP5P,- y "(Mvl1^BT f;e_04K Let me add their certainty that it is important to squeeze out all possible energy from a laser rangefinder. They do not realize that this energy goes mostly to increasing beam-width and extending the tail of the pulse.
)ZQHa7V (From: Spencer Luster (
sluster@lw4u.com).)
JtSuD>H`" -K:yU4V Qk?jG XB>^ I cannot count the number of times I have been asked: "Can't you put a lens or something in front of the source to make it brighter?". So far in my career I have refrained from answering, "It wouldn't work for you. It won't work for the light."
P;^y|0N m (From:
ehusman@zianet.com.)
| -JI`!7 c'"#q) Xq+!eO T You must be able to find some way of making *that* camera focus behind *that* telescope in such a way that the movement is on the scale of several inches, not several microns. It's simply too hard for technicians to focus that fine. You can use a different micrometer, with a bigger scale, or something.
mfj4`3:N V s.f`.o By using *simple* geometry, the customer can prove that the image will be larger than 5 microns at the focal plane, so don't tell them that 30 km of atmosphere is going to degrade the resolution. You can fix the problem with a Barlow, or something.
=n> iQS $5ZR [\$ There's enough light out at that time of morning for the customer to drive without headlights, so there must be enough light to take pictures, even at 100 microsecond exposure times. You should find a way to push-process the film more, and you shouldn't confuse the issue with any reference to spectral sensitivity, scattering, or extinction, because the webpedia says that sucker is 6,600 K all day long, every day of the year.
TFAYVK~
