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A light ray is a line or curve that is perpendicular to the light's wavefronts (and is therefore collinear with the wave vector). A slightly more rigorous definition of a light ray follows from Fermat's principle , which states that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time.
"High school physics textbooks" (PDF). Reports on high school physics. American Institute of Physics; Zitzewitz, Paul W. (2005). Physics: principles and problems. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0078458132
Given a line and any point A on it, we may consider A as decomposing this line into two parts. Each such part is called a ray and the point A is called its initial point. It is also known as half-line (sometimes, a half-axis if it plays a distinct role, e.g., as part of a coordinate axis). It is a one-dimensional half-space. The point A is ...
In string theory, a worldsheet is a two-dimensional manifold which describes the embedding of a string in spacetime. [1] The term was coined by Leonard Susskind [2] as a direct generalization of the world line concept for a point particle in special and general relativity.
Ray tracing of a beam of light passing through a medium with changing refractive index.The ray is advanced by a small amount, and then the direction is re-calculated. Ray tracing works by assuming that the particle or wave can be modeled as a large number of very narrow beams (), and that there exists some distance, possibly very small, over which such a ray is locally straight.
While wave-based models rely on the principles of Maxwell's equations, particle models use ray optics and Monte Carlo methods to simulate light paths. Monte Carlo Ray Tracing: A stochastic method used in light transport simulations to compute global illumination. This method leverages randomness to estimate solutions to the rendering equation ...
In geometry, a half-space is either of the two parts into which a plane divides the three-dimensional Euclidean space. [1] If the space is two-dimensional, then a half-space is called a half-plane (open or closed).
A light field, or lightfield, is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in a space. The space of all possible light rays is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function, and the magnitude of each ray is given by its radiance.