Light and Optics Careers

[Chris201W]

Hi,

I'm starting to think about college majors, and I'm interested in light and optics. What are some majors/careers that deal with this (rather general) field? Obviously physics, but can anyone think of anything more specific? Anyone actually work in this field who can provide some advice?

Thanks!

[carrot]

In some fields of chemistry you may work with light and optics... and flames -- for figuring out the chemical composition of various substances. Chromatography or something, maybe?

[Pajamas]

Did we forget the obvious....LASERS!

Which as we all know can be used in many fields (medicine, industrial engineering, communication, etc.)

[idleprocess]

There are a number of optical advances waiting to be made.

I seem to recall that researchers finally discovered how to make lenses with a negative index of refractions, which will allegedly lead to substantially cheaper and simpler lens assemblies.

"Electrowetting" lenses are another potential growth field - they consist of a drop of fluid that changes shape when the voltage across it changes; there are no other moving parts. It could put varifocal optics into very small packages that previously had to do without ... they're also exceptionally fast.

Those DLP chips that TI came up with are of interest...

There were a number of almost sci-fi advances in fiber optics that got put on hold after the .com crash ... switch vendors were talking about 100% optical switching with no O2E conversion - and the possibility of leasing wavelengths along 100% optical pathways to customers. This would be the next best thing to a "dry wire" between facilities - you could do almost anything you want to with it, yet the telco maintains it. I also remember some advance where an optical signal could be momentarily "frozen" and released at will back into the light path.

Optical computers are another possibility being explored ... even if those never happen, fiber is getting cheap enough to be considered a good general-purpose interconnect method for more and more devices.

I don't think I even touched on all the advances being made with LEDs, florescent tubes, HID lamps, and even the plain-vanilla incandescent lamp!

[moonkat]

idleprocess,
I view of what you just commented; I had discussion with coworker who switched to all Comcast cable. Changed telephone vendors from Verizon to Comcast - VOIP. His rationale was slightly less cost and that installers said cable is in place whereas Verizon does not have installed base/infrastructure to make transition to Internet connectivity (ADSL?).

You suggest massive bandwidth telephone capability. I never thought I would be paying the cable company as much as I do for cable and internet and am looking for opportunity to throttle their monopoly by jumping on the Verizon bandwagon. Comments?

[greenLED]

mechanical engineering
electrical engineering
chemistry
physics
materials engineering
?