Wine Glass Lensing
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
Wine glasses provide a suggestive analog for gravitational and optical lensing effects [1]. This Demonstration uses a wine glass to explore some of the visual parameters defined in [1]. Some selected parameter combinations can simulate various lens effects. Transitions between lens-like and non-lens-like states can display interesting patterns. The left panel shows the wine glass viewed from a non-orthographic perspective, while the right panel shows the flat projection of the wine glass base.
Contributed by: Alexandra L. Brosius (January 2021)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
The wine glass in this Demonstration has a wire-like stem whose shape is determined by parameters in nested cosine functions. The outermost is the coarse parameter, the intermediate is the ratio of the medium parameter to the coarse parameter, and the innermost is the ratio of the fine parameter to the coarse parameter. The plot is intended to be qualitative, so as to exhibit the logic and aesthetics of the illustrations.
This Demonstration was inspired by Sherry H. Suyu's Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize plenary lecture [2]. Reference [1] contains helpful background information about gravitational lensing.
References
[1]. A. Hume and J. Guzik. "Gravitational Lensing by a Point Mass" from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project—A Wolfram Web Resource. demonstrations.wolfram.com/GravitationalLensingByAPointMass.
[2]. S. H. Suyu. "H0LiCOW! Cosmology with Gravitational Lens Time Delays." 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Jan 11–15, 2021. www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/9243/session/208.
Permanent Citation
Gravitational Lensing by a Point Mass
Allison Hume (Baldwin School) and Jacek Guzik (University of Pennsylvania)
Microlensing Light Curve for Stellar Objects
Bryan Brzycki
Modeling Light Curves
Jeff Bryant
Ray Diagrams for Lenses
Ernest Lee
Gravitational Lensing of a Point Source
Rob Morris
Polarization of an Optical Wave through Polarizers and Wave Plates
Fred E. Moolekamp and Kevin L. Stokes (University of New Orleans)
Computation of Radiative Transfer
Brian Kent
Lane-Emden Equation in Stellar Structure
Brian Kent
Effective and Inertial Masses of a Photon Near a Black Hole for a Family of Envelope Orbits
Wladimir Belayev
Binary Inspiral Gravitational Waves from a Post-Newtonian Expansion
Leo C. Stein
