If you are stereoblind/have monopsis please consider vision therapy. Don't listen to doctors who say you are too old: find one who will treat you. I've now seen in 3D a few times and it has been simply amazing (was born with a crossed eye that ended up turning into a lazy eye.... two surgeries later it looks good but no 3D nor depth perception.
This book is fantastic for starting out. It just has so many topics
https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Photonics-Bahaa-Saleh/dp/0471358320
Don’t pay this price for it. I think I got mine for like $50 on eBay.
There’s also a book with the author called Hecht. Just google Eugene Hecht Optics textbook
I'm also from Canada and started getting into physics around your child's age. (I'm now a grad student.)
If he's interested, you should get him both popular books and a good introductory textbook. I can't speak as to other provinces, but the physics curriculum in Ontario leaves much to be desired. For this reason, I think it's worth self-studying physics if he's interested. Irrespective of whether he pursued physics as a career, the skills you acquire from doing physics carry over to many different fields, and (more importantly) it's fun!
You've already received many good recommendations for popular books - I'll add QED: the strange theory of light and matter, by Feynman. Here's a link to it on Amazon.
As for textbooks, I'd get him a nice book on calculus and any introductory physics text. I learned calculus from this book, which is intended for self-study. It's a pretty old book, but it's great.
A bunch of good youtube channels have already been brought up in this thread, and the only one I'll add is 3blue1brown, who makes some beautiful and accessible videos about math.
Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It all Work https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470402296/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_SwGQFb9B50840
This one covers a bunch of stuff with frontends.
Horowitz and Hill have a solid section too.
The Art of Electronics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521809266/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_FzGQFbJJ4PD2A
Wow. It's wonderful that you're so excited about optics. I have been made fun of in the past for wondering around and looking at stuff through binoculars just because things look so much different through binoculars. One thing that's cool to notice is that in addition to the magnification, there's a distance compression that goes on. For instance, if there is one tree close to you, and another further away, then they'll look much closer together through the binoculars or telescope. Take notice next time you have a look. I always thought it was like those old 3d viewers with the slide wheels, which I really enjoyed as a kid.
I don't have a solid book recommendation, unfortunately, as most of the optics books I own are textbooks. This one from Amazon gets pretty good reviews, however, and is relatively inexpensive, but from the reviews it sounds like you should have some background in physics: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Optics-Dover-Physics/dp/0486659577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431040075&sr=8-1&keywords=optics.
As for astronomy, and telescopes, I think this book is the absolute best: NightWatch by Terence Dickinson. I started getting into amateur astronomy with that book. It has information on telescopes and binoculars and eyepieces, and how to choose them. It has information on the things you can see, how to read star maps, pretty much everything a beginner needs to know. I bought a few other astronomy books, but I always kept going back to this one. http://www.amazon.com/NightWatch-Practical-Guide-Viewing-Universe/dp/155407147X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431039313&sr=8-1&keywords=nightwatch+book
You might be interested in this book -
It’s a book by a scientist who was born with amblyopia and fixed her 3D vision as an adult.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, boxed set: The New Millennium Edition
$129.04
You might want to take some time and read Feynman's presentation.
I'm fairly confident my post summarizes his approach.
Remember it was Feynman who gave the teams at Stanford a conceptual model they could understand. That understanding led them to prove the existence of quarks. The guy was no dummy.
I didn't say the glass absorbs photons. I said the electrons either absorb or emit the photons.
> A more appropriate description is that the electrons in the glass are perturbed by the incident light... You're describing electrons absorbing photons.
"My explanation" isn't mine. It's Feynman's. Rather, it's my gross simplification of his 4, 1 hour lectures. It's a particle-centric explanation instead of wave-centric explanation and is a hell of a lot easier to understand as to what's going on.
You can cite all the Internet sources you want but Feynman literally wrote the book on QED. Well he, Schwinger and Tomonaga did. Schwinger's approach was supplanted by Feynman's. His diagrams made renormalization computation far easier to the point that Schwinger moaned Feynman had made renormalization too easy.
The short answer is electrons absorb and emit photons as photons travel through matter. The direction the photons are emitted is a probabilistic function of the photon's energy. If the absorbed photon didn't have enough energy to make the electron change orbitals, the emitted photon most likely be emitted in a certain direction. If the absorbed photon did have the requisite energy for the electron to jump, then when a photon is eventually emitted, it'll be in different direction.
The idea that glass is transparent to visible light because the light doesn't have enough energy to be absorbed by electrons in the glass is wrong. The photons are being absorbed and emitted willy nilly, but the most likely direction the photons are emitted is in the same direction the absorbed photons were initially traveling. This interpretation explains why some photons are reflected, why the optical clarity of glass varies sinusoidaly and indefinitely as you thicken glass, why light travels more slowly in glass than it does in vacuum and a host of other aspects.
Richard Feynman, a physicist who won a Nobel prize for inventing a technique for computing how electrons and photons interact, gave a series of four lectures in 1984 that describe the process in laymen's terms. The lectures are available here Be prepared to be surprised by what he said, it's not the usual stuff you stumble across around the net or many college lectures. Thing is, his computational techniques and diagrams are what are used.
For optical science (not medical) Optics by Eugene Hect is a common text: https://www.amazon.com/Optics-5th-Eugene-Hecht-dp-0133977226/dp/0133977226/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1620845238.
Here's a video from a series I'm a fan of..
From here, the answer isn't really that interesting. QED is the fundamental theory for individual electromagnetic interactions. Magnetism is the result of a massive conglomeration of electromagnetic interactions.
A "magnetic field" is just a term for a specific subcomponent of the electromagnetic field. So a magnet is just the result of a bunch of QED interactions between electrons and photons on a massive scale that coincidently manages to cancel out the electric field components.
The details of how this cancellation is done is kinda like analyzing the individual grains of sand in a sandcastle (at least to me). I think a simple model of a pure electric field goes by the name "coherent" something something. I visualize it as a bunch of photons floating through air constantly going through a photon -> electron+positron -> photon cycle that manages to yield a net 0 magnetic field. A pure magnetic field would be similar. e.g. as interesting as counting sand grains.
But ultimately -- the actual interesting question is "what is the fundamental first principle cause of the electromagnetic interaction." And that would be what the physicist in the video I linked above goes into. The great Richard Feynman wrote a book about this topic with the aim of being readable by common folk. It might be of interest to you.
You might get something from reading Phil Hobbs' book. He has designed a lot of TIAs using both opamps and hybrids of opamps and various exotic FETs, etc. optimised for various combinations of budget, bandwidth and noise.
Hecht's "Optics" is my first go-to (https://www.amazon.com/Optics-5th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0133977226). There are a few other classics textbooks, like Born amd Wolf's "Principles of Optics" too.
I find Hecht has a great balance of theory and practice, with good figures and comprehensible treatment of the subject (for a non-specialist experimental solid mechanician).
One, I'm not attacking anyone and particularly not the youngsters. I'm trying to speed their progress. I provided plenty of directions on what they should be reading. Go up to my initial comment here. I didn't dismiss Graham completely; instead I suggested people read Zhang first for some proper framework. In particular, his approach is compatible with efficient markets so the premiums are there to be earned by everyone. (More broadly I like to live with an abundance mindset. It's not always zero sum, mi amigo, especially since we are not talking about alpha here.)
You present yourself as a thinking man and professional, but sometimes I wonder if you have a reading comprehension problem or alternatively your reading ability is fine but you are so resistant to the viewpoints of others that you fail to understand them properly before you lash out. I'm no psychologist so I will leave that to your therapist.
Second, go knock yourself out with his lectures (https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed-set/dp/0465023827/) . Not a real test since you are smarter than the average /r/investing bear but give it an honest effort and report back in a month.
First of all I will say that no matter what you look at, physics is one of those things where you can never be "correct" per se without understanding the math. That goes double for QM which is math all the way down. No matter how you explain it, you will always find that "but what about this exception" can be answered to your satisfaction only by getting a mathematically rigorous treatment of the topic.
That said, for understanding quantum on a "fun" level (i.e. skipping a couple of years of calculus, linear algebra, and numerical analysis), I'd recommend Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. A very well-known and highly respected physicist with a talent for teaching. Although "quantum electrodynamics" as covered in the book is not strictly QM as generally imagined, he does cover the core of what is at interest in quantum theory (electromagnetic interactions at a subatomic level) in a pretty interesting and decently understandable way. That sounds like about what you're looking for.
You might be interested in Fixing My Gaze, a book by neuroscientist Sue Barry on using vision therapy to gain 3-D vision. It's been at least a year since I've read it, but I remember her discussing how beautiful she found watching snow fall when she could see the space between the flakes.
Barry shares similar experiences in a TED talk. The start of the talk is worth watching for context, but if you want to jump straight to her experience of 3-D vision, it starts at 11:00 minutes.
In the book, she mentions a truck driver who had to quit his job after gaining 3-D vision because he could no longer use his lazy eye to read signs while his dominant eye watched the road. However, I got the impression most people who gain it consider it worthwhile.
Thanks for the well thought out and written response. Would you consider cases of advanced age like Sue Barry to be outliers then? Her book kicked off quite a bit of discussion in the field when it dropped (disclosure: my wife is an OD and knows Sue well). > New England Journal of Medicine: “One axis of [Barry’s] book is a graceful and grateful appreciation of a newly acquired ‘ability to see the volume of space between objects and to see each object as occupying its own space’ – revelations that allowed her to live ‘among’ and ‘in’ the things of this world and gave her first movements of snow falling, trees branching, and a faucet arcing out of the sink…. The book’s main contribution, however, is exposing the wrong-headed dogma that acuity and binocular vision can be restored only during a critical developmental period.”
To quote Richard Feynman >"...there is also an amplitude for light to go faster (or slower) than the conventional speed of light. You found out in the last lecture that light doesn't go only in straight lines; now, you find out that it doesn't go only at the speed of light! It may surprise you that there is an amplitude for a photon to go at speeds faster or slower than the conventional speed, c."
When Feynman said "amplitude" he meant "the square of the probability of an event." The above quote came from a series of lectures he gave at UCLA that were subsequently published.
Strabismus.
I can recommend this book, it has some techniques to try and retrain your brain:
http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-My-Gaze-Scientists-Dimensions/dp/0465020739
They could be recreated in VR quite easily I would think.
I recommend the Feynman Lectures on Physics, they are very clear and reaches up to quantum theory. If you feel that you don't know enough mathematics then you can read Schaum's Outline series on Calculus, and whatever other topic you feel is stopping you.
I have used the Bates method to avoid bifocals. My contacts are are optimized for indoor distances and I have a pair of simple glasses I put on for distance/driving.
This book is a very good resource. It describes how lenses were originally intended to be an eye exercise tool, to "cure" the problem by tugging on the eye muscles and not how we use them today as a permanent helper.
If you want the long and complete answer, read QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton Science Library by Richard Feynman. Fascinating stuff that will melt your mind.
I'm really sorry for that, man. That's what they said would eventually happen to me as well when I was 14 so I should wear corrective lenses. I hated glasses, not to mention the difference was so drastic that the doc had to prescribe a small number for my right eye as well, so I ended up ditching them for good. 23 years later, the right is still fine and dandy, except for the whole stereopsis thing, of course. Funny thing is, Lasik would totally take care of the defects in the left, but I'd still have the amblyopia, since the brain got accustomed to that one sending utter shit so it ignores it. However, recent research has proved the brain is much more flexible than previously believed and amblyopia can be corrected through therapy well beyond the infancy, like the old literature used to teach. This book is a wonderful account of how a neuroscientist was finally able to develop tridimensional vision in her forties. Trouble is, the breakthrough therapy is proprietary afaik, and I don't have a few thousand bucks just lying around so it won't happen any time in the near future for me. It would certainly be nice to get a spare eye at some point, though.
Neither of these are exact matches, but it might be this: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Optics-Dover-Physics/dp/0486659577
or this:http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Light-Color-Edwin-Babbitt/dp/0766105377
They used to think that, but there have been several cases where through surgery and optometric vision therapy people have gained stereovision. See the book Fixing My Gaze by Susan R Barry
I was told that having surgery when mine was diagnosed (age 20, 34 now) could cause more complications since the brain "wires" itself to the condition and making a change can cause permanent vision problems much worse that I currently have.
There is an interesting book about a woman who got surgery in her 50s and was able to achieve 3D sight: Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions
My mother's cousin did a lot of work with Dr Sacks. She wrote about it here I would love to see him do an AMA
This phenomenon is explained in this book. In short, your eyes have the ability to see crystal clear all the time if you train them in a particular way.