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Asked by freddo to Aislinn, Fiona, Nathan, Padraic, Sinead on 9 Feb 2015.
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Nathan Quinlan answered on 9 Feb 2015:
It’s a way of calculating the path of a ray of light through glass and other materials. I don’t use it directly, but I use non-standard camera setups where I have to understand a bit of about refraction and how lenses work (1/u + 1/v = 1/f and that sort of thing). For example when we do experiments on flowing liquids in my lab, we use water, but a lot of people who do this kind of work use special fluids with high refractive index. Because of that we have to make our windows extra thin to get good images on the camera.
I’m an amateur at optics. I’m sure Padraic will chime in with a decent answer.
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Padraic Morrissey answered on 9 Feb 2015:
In college I used Fermat’s Principle quite a bit when I was studying optics. It basically describes the path taken by light as it goes from one point to another. The idea is that the light will always take the route that has the shortest time. This doesn’t sound like a very interesting principle but is actually really useful! Fermat used it to describe the phenomena of refraction and reflection of light.
You might not have heard of refraction before but it describes the bending of light as it passes through materials which have different densities (other properties are important too!).
There are lots of good video on YouTube that explain refraction and how important Fermat’s Principle is. Check out:
If you’re interested in Fermat you should read up on his “Last Theorem”. It’s a really difficult maths problem that people thought was actually unsolvable! It took over 350 years for people to work it out!
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Sinead Quirke answered on 9 Feb 2015:
Hi Freddo,
No I don’t use Fermats principle and I don’t remember studying it.
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Aislinn Coghlan answered on 9 Feb 2015:
Hi Freddo,
I’ve never come across this theorem! I don’t remember studying it in college and I’ve yet to come across it in work.
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