Deep Physics: Optics for Talented Middle Schoolers, Princeton
Real optics, taught from light as rays through mirrors, lenses, color, and the eye. For talented middle schoolers.
A World Through the Lens of Optics
Light is the most familiar thing in physics. You see by it from the moment you open your eyes in the morning. And yet almost everything light does, from a straw bending in a glass of water to a rainbow appearing after a storm, follows from a few clean rules.
Drop a pencil into a glass of water. Look at it from the side. It looks broken at the surface. Pull the pencil out. It is straight. Where does the break come from?
Stand in front of a mirror and wave your right hand. The reflection waves the hand on its other side. Hold up some writing to the mirror. The letters come out backwards. What exactly does a mirror do to the world?
Sunlight passes through a glass prism and comes out spread into a rainbow. Shine the same sunlight on a CD. You see the same colors. The light coming in was white. Where did the colors come from?
Hold a magnifying glass in the sun above a sheet of paper. Move it up and down until the bright spot on the paper is as small and bright as possible. The paper can catch fire. What does the lens do to the light?
A small set of ideas, light traveling in straight lines, bouncing off mirrors, bending as it enters glass or water, and spreading into colors, explains every one of these. The same ideas explain how a camera takes a picture, how a microscope makes things look bigger, and how your own eye sees.
This camp teaches you what physicists actually know about it. From the beginning.
You will:
- Predict, by drawing on paper, where the image of an object will form in a mirror or lens, and how big it will be.
- Explain why a swimming pool looks shallower than it really is, and why a fish underwater is not quite where it appears to be.
- See why white light is a mixture of colors, and why a rainbow always shows them in the same order.
- Understand how the lens of your own eye forms a tiny image on the back of it, and why glasses or contacts can correct what goes wrong.
By the end, you will think about light the way a physicist thinks about it.
What You Will Actually Understand
By the end, you will understand six core ideas of optics.
1. Light as Rays
The simplest useful picture of light. Light traveling in straight lines until something gets in its way. Shadows and the size of the light source. Why a pinhole camera works. The ray picture as the right tool for everything in this course, set against the wave picture, which is for later.
2. Reflection and Mirrors
The first rule: the angle going in equals the angle going out.Flat mirrors and where their images form. Curved mirrors: concave mirrors that focus light to a point, and convex mirrors that spread it out. Drawing rays on paper to find any mirror image before you check it with a real mirror.
3. Refraction and Snell’s Law
Why a straw looks broken in a glass of water. Light bending as it crosses from air into water or glass, and the rule that describes the bend: Snell’s law. Total internal reflection: why light can be trapped inside a glass fiber and used to carry signals around the world.
4. Lenses and Image Formation
How a piece of curved glass can make a picture. Converging lenses that bring light to a focus, and diverging lenses that spread it out. The thin-lens formula. Ray tracing: a clean recipe for finding any image, real or virtual, magnified or shrunk, upright or upside down, before you look through the lens.
5. Color and Dispersion
Why a prism makes a rainbow. White light as a mixture of all colors. Dispersion: different colors bend by different amounts in glass or water. Why a rainbow always appears in the same order, and why you cannot find one without rain. Why the sky is blue and a sunset is red, in outline.
6. The Eye and Optical Instruments
How the rules of optics put a tiny picture on the back of your eye. The eye as a small optical system: cornea, lens, and retina. Nearsighted and farsighted vision and what glasses do about them. A magnifying glass, a simple camera, and a basic telescope, each as a few lenses arranged in the right order.
The specific topics, and the depth given to each, may shift depending on the dynamics of the cohort. The destination, a working understanding of optics from rays through image formation and the eye, stays the same.
Schedule, Pricing & Enrollment
Formats: Fall and Spring semester course (paired with Electricity & Magnetism), or Summer single-topic camp.
Schedule, format, tuition, refund policy, and transcripts apply to every Lyceum course and camp. They live on the Physics Lyceum: Middle School overview.
To enroll, schedule a call. We confirm the right format and starting point for your student.
Part of the SoTS Physics Lyceum
Optics is one of four middle school topics in the SoTS Physics Lyceum: Middle School program in Princeton, NJ.
Mechanics. Thermodynamics. Electricity and magnetism. Optics. A motivated student finishes all four during 7th and 8th grade and arrives at the high school Lyceum already grounded in classical physics.
The Lyceum is built on the Deep Physics methodology: clear theory built up step by step, paired with thought experiments and problems worked together in seminar.