opticaladj.n.

1570 J. Dee in H. Billingsley tr. Euclid Elements Geom. Math. Præf. sig. Aiij^v The chief Science, of the Archemaster..is an other (as it were) Optical Science.

1663 R. Boyle Some Considerations Usefulnesse Exper. Nat. Philos. i. 96 An eye thus frozen, may be cut along that which Optical Writers call the Optical Axis, and then it affords an instructive Prospect.

1736 Bp. J. Butler Analogy of Relig. i. i. 20 Common optical Experiments.

1831 D. Brewster Treat. Optics ii. §23. 16 The image..cannot be used for any optical purpose.

1869 J. Tyndall Notes 9 Lect. on Light §117 Hence the all-important optical law: ‘the sine of the angle of incidence divided by the sine of the angle of refraction is a constant quantity’.

1927 N. V. Sidgwick Electronic Theory of Valency 32 X-rays differ from ‘optical’ radiation—a term used to cover the infra-red, visible and ultra-violet—only in degree, being of much shorter wave-length.

1944 R. A. Sawyer Exper. Spectrosc. xi. 277 Infrared spectroradiometers differ from those used in the ultraviolet, or visible, regions chiefly because of the optical characteristics of the infrared region.

1970 Sci. Jrnl. Mar. 14 The first machine to automate completely one of the important processes of optical astronomy.

1990 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 430 590 The optical properties exhibit a resonance in the ultraviolet which resembles glassy carbon data in band structure.

1570 J. Dee in H. Billingsley tr. Euclid Elements Geom. Math. Præf. sig. Aiij^v The Astronomer, and the Opticall Mechanicien.

1605 W. Camden Remaines i. 203 Pecham that Opticall Archbishop of Canterbury, who writte Perspectiva Communis.

1704 J. Norris Ess. Ideal World II. vii. 359 So..we are told by the optical men.

1815 D. Stewart Diss. Progress Philos. (1858) i. ii. 132 The various signs of it, enumerated by optical writers.

1953 Science 23 Oct. 492 This decision was made..despite some warnings by qualified optical men that the system may not produce satisfactory results.

1993 C. Wolf-Devine Descartes on Seeing iv. 71 This passage is the source from which later optical writers take their solution to the problem of situation perception.

1947 Jrnl. Textile Inst. 38 A. 521 ‘Optical bleaching’ is defined as the physical alteration of a white fabric in such a way as to make it reflect, in addition to white light, a certain amount of blue light, and thereby producing a much ‘bluer’ and also brighter white than before.

1959 Which? Sept. 107/2 If a detergent with optical white is used on a white fabric too generously or too often, the fabric can get a blue or mauve tint which is not particularly pleasing.

1971 A. K. Sarkar Fluorescent Whitening Agents i. 1 Fluorescent whitening agents are known under various names, e.g. optical whitening agents, optical bleaching agents or optical bleaches.

1990 Which? Feb. 87/1 Not all white shirts appear to be a neutral white and some, particularly under shop lighting, appear to have a definite blue or violet shade. There is no need to be too alarmed by this; it means the shirt contains an optical whitener.

1964 N.Y. Times 12 Apr. x19/6 The two movements that displaced..abstract expressionism are in process—Pop (New Realism) and the New Abstraction (Optical Art).

1965 Listener 4 Feb. 196/3 To pass..to the American optical painter Edward Avedisian, and thence to the British Patrick Caulfield, is to realize the impossibility to trying to apply consistent standards to modern art.

1970 C. Barrett Op Art i. 7/1 The evolution of abstract art was a preliminary step towards the development of optical painting.

1988 M. Chabon Myst. Pittsburgh x. 115 I turned away and watched the optical blobs of color float across the immaculate walls of the living room.

1995 N.Y. Times 24 Jan. b6/2 He modernized simple shapes—the sleeveless dress to the knee, the spencer-jacket suit, the draped gown—with bold optical prints in pastel colors.

1944 Polit. Sci. Q. 59 368 The true rival of Germany was the one Power which..could surpass her in synthetic rubber, chemicals, opticals, etc.

1954 Science 3 Dec. 923/2 E. Leitz will exhibit microscopes..and scientific opticals in general.

1976 L. St. Clair Fortune in Death v. 57 The jeweler..fixed the optical under one eyebrow, and carefully examined the cigar.

1983 Times 9 Feb. 14/4 Reduced demand for new spectacles knocked United Kingdom opticals sales.

1997 BBC Wildlife Mar. 95/1 Look at some of these creatures through high magnification opticals and you get a whole new visual experience.

1953 K. Reisz Technique Film Editing 281 Optical, any device carried out by the optical department of a laboratory requiring the use of the optical printer, e.g., dissolve, fade, wipe.

1959 Punch 28 Oct. 366/2 Many amateurs are clearly of the opinion that this is of minor importance, their chief concern being to demonstrate their skill at devising star-burst wipes and other trick opticals.

1968 S. E. Whitfield in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’ i. viii. 131 The specialized (and extremely expensive) opticals required for Star Trek continued to threaten frightening consequences.

1993 R. White Advertising (BNC) (ed. 3) 132 The film goes back to the laboratory to be married to its sound track and to have its ‘opticals’ added.

1966 New Statesman 5 Aug. 208/2 A sizzling red-blue optical by Ellsworth Kelly.

1877 Chem. News 23 Nov. 230/1 The optical activity disappears in those derivatives of active bodies, by the formation of which the so-called asymonetry [sic] of the carbon atoms ceases.

1913 Science 11 July 39/1 (title) The optical activity of petroleum and its significance.

1991 E. A. V. Ebsworth et al. Struct. Methods in Inorg. Chem. (ed. 2) (BNC) 294 A molecule or ion with no improper rotation axis is chiral, and will show optical activity.

1952 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 244 219 The optical-lever amplifier developed for this investigation is described elsewhere.]

1963 Microwave Res. Inst. Symp. Ser. 13 131 This paper presents the salient facts on noise in optical amplifiers of coherent signals.

1995 Sci. Amer. Sept. 57/1 The optical amplifier..allows the power of a signal to be restored to its original strength without the usual optical-to-electronic conversion.

1663 R. Boyle Some Considerations Usefulnesse Exper. Nat. Philos. i. 96 An eye thus frozen, may be cut along that which Optical Writers call the Optical Axis, and then it affords an instructive Prospect.

1748 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 45 153 Their Eyes have so great a Liberty in the Orbits, that they are able to turn them any Way,..which..enables them to change or direct their Optical Axis to any designed Place.

1854 J. D. Dana Syst. Mineral. (ed. 4) Introd. 20 A line bisecting the..angle between these optical axes is called a bisectrix.

1966 R. Webster Pract. Gemmol. (ed. 4) x. 100 For the whole condenser to be swung clear of the optical axis of the microscope.

1974 V. B. Mountcastle et al. Med. Physiol. (ed. 13) I. xiv. 452/2 One may postulate the existence of an anteroposterior axis of symmetry, which is also the optical axis of the eye.

1874 Nature 1 Jan. 160/2 We miss all mention of the optical bank, and the mathematical expressions for results involving the determination of distance in terms of differential measures on that instrument.

1903 T. H. Blakesley Geom. Optics ix. 76 If an optical bank is available, methods depending on magnification observations can be employed with great advantage.

2003 Exper. Fluids 35 359/2 This backscattering probe is mounted on an optical bank.

1880 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 171 675 The spectroscope..was then fixed upon a kind of optical bench, on which also slide two lenses of quartz.

1926 New Phytologist 25 114 The Katharometer..is mounted on a large optical bench along which it can be moved so as to obtain various intensities of illumination.

1995 Independent 15 Mar. 17/3 The Natural History Unit took an ‘optical bench’ to the Bath & West Show, allowing visitors to see water-flea larvae blown up on screen.

1968 Proc. IEEE 56 1758/1 Optical bistability can be achieved with CW operated GaAs lasers.

1995 Sci. Amer. June 40/2 Passner has worked on optical bistability in solids and on a magnetic antimatter ‘bottle’ for trapping a positron plasma.

1954 Times of India 10 Apr. (Ahmedabad Textile Industry Res. Assoc. Suppl.) p. iii (advt.) Godrej Washing Soap (Grains), contain ‘Optical Brightener’ to wash quickly and effortlessly.

2004 Jrnl. Coatings Technol. & Res. (Nexis) 1 52 Dolly Blue, Robin Blue, and Reckitt's Blue are still in use today, although they have been superseded to a large degree by optical brighteners.

1962 Science 13 July 73 (advt.) The elliptical optical cavity gives high pumping efficiency.

1997 Nature 6 Nov. 17/3 One consequence of this giant Kerr nonlinearity is that an optical cavity can be controlled by single photons.

1801 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 91 41 The optical centre will be therefore..about one-tenth of an inch from the anterior surface: hence we have 22 hundredths, for the distance of the centre from the cornea.

1847 A. Smee Vision in Health & Dis. iii. 37 The adjustment of the exact centre of the glass to the optical centres is so important in practice, that I have contrived an instrument to measure the width accurately between these centres.

1989 Encycl. Brit. XXVII. 140/2 In the eyes of animals active during the day.., the lens is smaller; as a result, the optical centre is closer to the front of the eye.

1962 Proc. Symp. Optical Char. Recognition i. 133 The IBM 1418 Optical Character Reader..provides an example of the maximum tolerance for several of these variables that can be obtained in today's commercially available character readers.

1974 Encycl. Brit. Macropædia XIV. 892/1 The U.S. Post Office has had an alpha-numeric optical character reader in operation on live mail since 1965.

1990 Annapolitan July 39/1 A new optical character reader scanner reads words and characters from typed copy onto a disc—eliminating tedious keyboarding.

1958 Communications Assoc. Computing Machinery 1 18 Printing in magnetic ink overcomes the problems of obliteration and mutilation which harass optical character recognition systems.

1970 O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing iii. 64 In optical character recognition (OCR), the reader responds to the darkness of the ink, just as the human eye does.

1992 MacUser Nov. 26/3 You can buy a small, dedicated business-card scanner and drop a stack of cards into it; using optical character recognition, the device stores all the information on a floppy.

1901 Science 27 Dec. 989/2 The optical comparator [is] one of the most important instruments at the disposal of the acoustician.

1967 Economist 14 Oct. (Advt. Suppl. following p. 176) The image of the gauge, magnified to 50 times its size, is projected on the screen of the Optical Comparator so that the finest details of the thread can be examined and checked.

2002 Sound & Vision May 83/3 Next up will be a tool for measuring and adjusting the TV's color temperature. This can range from an optical comparator..to a tristimulus color analyzer.

1985 Nature 10 Jan. 105 (title) Optical dating of sediments.

1995 Daily Tel. 17 Feb. 9 The archaeological team..had made use of optical stimulated luminescence dating. ‘This is known more simply as optical dating, which can give the approximate date of the last exposure to sunlight of the buried soils,’ said Mr Miles.

1864 D. A. Wells Nat. Philos. 317 If we rub a ground glass surface with wax, or any other substance of nearly the same optical density, we fill up the irregularities and restore its transparency.

1891 Jrnl. Soc. Chem. Industry 31 Jan. 20/1 From the colour of the negatives..the photographic and optical densities were very nearly alike.

1953 J. W. T. Walsh Photometry (ed. 2) v. 161 The reciprocal of the transmission factor of a plate is sometimes termed the opacity of the plate and the logarithm to base 10 of the opacity is often known as the optical density of the plate.

1990 T. G. Wreghitt & P. Morgan-Capner ELISA in Clin. Microbiol. Lab. viii. 115 A reduction in optical density of 50% or more compared to the test wells is considered to be a positive blocking reaction.

1957 Science 15 Feb. 303/3 (title) Rapid selector and optical disc memories as applied to document search.

1977 Computer & Information Syst. 17 514/1 The objective of the program is to develop an inexpensive optical disk recorder suitable for minicomputer applications.

1994 Sports Illustr. 26 Sept. 4d/1 At Pioneer, we've led the revolution in laser optical disc technology with car CD players, LaserDisc and CD-ROM.

2001 B. Broady In this Block there lives Slag 147 They wore..beanie hats with spinning propellers or optical disks.

1979 Internat. Conf. Video & Data Recording (Inst. Electronic & Radio Engineers) (Suppl.) 1 (title) Optical disc drive.]

1983 Electronic Engin. 55 56/1 Since data on the optical drive will be addressed in logical blocks..the user need not be concerned with integrating a drive with many more tracks than a Winchester.

1995 Macworld Oct. 123/3 Phase-change dual (PD) drives..combine the functions of a 650MB optical drive with a quad-speed CD-ROM player.

1960 Science 22 Apr. 1254/3 The probe used in the mouth is attached to a flexible optical fiber bundle.

1974 McGraw-Hill Yearbk. Sci. & Technol. 27/1 Optical fibers that act as ‘light pipes’ have been around for some years.

1992 Everyday Electronics (BNC) June 376 For a greater range of communication, it is more efficient to channel the light signal along an optical fibre.

1897 Astrophysical Jrnl. 5 134 The second..requires two large optical flats, each about one and one-half times the aperture of the telescope itself.

1957 R. S. Longhurst Geom. & Physical Optics viii. 135 If an optical flat is placed in contact with a shallow convex spherical surface, a thin air film of varying thickness results.

1992 Science 30 Oct. 784/3 The ends of the sections are ground with diamond compound and final polished to an optical flat.

1892 Science 12 Aug. 89/1 Optical isomers..may..be taken as the analogues of enantiomorphous crystals, as of quartz, right-handed and left-handed; the pairs in each case being perfectly equivalent, but not superposable.

1942 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 179 258 An enzyme will attack at different rates the two optical isometers in a racemic mixture.

1992 C. A. Smith & E. J. Wood Biosynthesis i. 8 Many organic molecules with asymmetric carbon atoms can exist as optical isomers.

1894 Jrnl. Chem. Soc. 66 i. 422 (heading) Optical isomerism of closed chain compounds.

1990 Isis 81 50 As soon as Pasteur formulated the notion of optical isomerism, questions about the spatial organization of the atomic components of molecules became unavoidable.

1971 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 323 315 Scattering from mixed modes including coupling between plasma and cyclotron resonances and also the coupling between these and optical lattice modes has also been observed.]

1992 Physical Rev. A. 46 5956 (title) Two-dimensional optical lattices in a CO₂ laser.

1994 New Scientist 29 Jan. 32/2 These atomic arrays are formed by bathing the atoms of a gas in a fixed pattern of light called an optical lattice.

1894 London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 5th Ser. 37 515 The time it takes for an impulse at G to pass completely through F will be that required by light to go over a space equal to the difference in optical length of the extreme rays GBF and GAF.

1934 W. H. A. Fincham Optics ii. 26 nl is termed the optical length of a path l in medium of refractive index n.

2001 ASAP (Nexis) 1 June 117 It is crucial that the optical length of both interferometer arms is maintained absolutely constant during the integration time of the CCD camera.

1928 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 121 43 The movement of the cylinder..should be observed by a high power optical microscope.

1953 Jrnl. Appl. Physics 24 623/1 The experiments so far made support the theoretical indications that x-ray shadow micrography is a practicable technique at least up to the resolution of the optical microscope.

1991 Sci. Amer. Feb. 46/3 In 1987 one of us..demonstrated the first holographic microscope whose resolution was superior to that of the optical microscope.

1952 R. E. Le Levier & D. Saxon in Physical Rev. 87 40/1 We have investigated an optical model for nucleon-nuclei scattering in which a complex square well potential is used, this being equivalent to a complex index of refraction.

1993 Science 5 Nov. 877 The observed line widths and shapes are compared with the predictions of a semiclassical atom optical model.

1985 S. Chu et al. in Physical Rev. Lett. 55 48/2 An estimate of the confinement time can be obtained by the observation that the motion of atoms in a viscous fluid of photons (‘optical molasses’) is analogous to diffusion in classical Brownian motion.

1996 Sci. Amer. Jan. 22/1 They directed the stream through ‘optical molasses’—a laser beam set just below the frequency at which chromium atoms resonate like struck bells—which slowed the atoms.

1981 R. F. Lyon in VLSI Syst. & Computations 1 (title) The optical mouse, and an architectural methodology for smart digital sensors.

1992 MacWorld June 190/1 Mouse Systems A3 optical mouse gives the smooth ride and tight resolution characteristic of optical devices.

1893 London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 5th Ser. 35 471 The phenomenon is due to the interference of two parallel gratings... Their distance, which is virtually constant, is the optical path, 2ne, e being the thickness, and n the index of the gelatine.

1923 R. Glazebrook Dict. Appl. Physics IV. 310/1 The function has the dimensions of a length, and..represents the length of the optical path between the points whose co-ordinates are taken as variables.

1992 Astronomy May 71/1 The optical path of the telescope and the polar axis of the fork mount not only lie parallel but overlap.

1944 Jrnl. Soc. Motion Pict. Engin. 42 204 The use of the optical printer to enhance the value of the modern motion picture is demanded increasingly by studios with foresight enough to give a free hand to the man in charge of the optical department.

1974 L. Lipton Independent Filmmaking i. 39 Optical printers are used to make dissolves, special effects, frame line corrections, freeze-frame printing and so on.

1987 D. Clandfield Canad. Film vi. 113 He expanded cameraless animation,..engraving lines on to the film and printing the negative through colour filters on an optical printer.

1952 Physical Rev. 85 1051/2 The net result is an optical ‘pumping’ as Kastler suggests, from m = − ½ to m = + ½, or a tendency in the direction of nuclear orientation. This is in competition with a disorienting tendency caused by collisions.

1970 G. K. Woodgate Elem. Atomic Struct. ix. 191 Recently..the methods of optical pumping, double resonance, and level-crossing spectroscopy have begun to provide data on the hyperfine structure of excited states.

1998 Physics News Update (Electronic text) 21 Oct. One of these techniques is ‘spin-exchange optical pumping’, a process in which circularly polarized laser light transfers its spin to rubidium vapor.

1901 G. K. Burgess tr. H. Le Chatelier & O. L. Boudouard High-temp. Measurem. viii. 155 The optical pyrometer, by reason of the uncertainty of emissive powers.., cannot give as accurate results as other pyrometric methods.

1958 R. W. Bussard & R. D. DeLauer Nucl. Rocket Propulsion viii. 303 The optical pyrometer has been built around the frequency-response characteristics of the human eye.

2002 ASAP (Nexis) 1 May 26 External surface temperatures..were compared and correlated with optical pyrometer measurements.

1881 Proc. Royal Soc. 32 312 1.974 grm. of dry cane-sugar was dissolved in 25 cub. centims. of kóji extract, then diluted to 100 cub. centims. The amount of optical rotation was found..to be 15.8 scale-divisions.

1929 R. A. Gortner Outl. Biochem. xxi. 473 Naturally-occurring tartaric acid is the d form, and its purity is usually determined by the optical rotation of a solution of the acid.

1981 P. Sykes Guidebk. to Mechanism in Org. Chem. (ed. 5) iv. 88 Compounds that have the same configuration do not necessarily exhibit the same direction of optical rotation.

1893 Jrnl. Chem. Soc. 26 829 The rotatory dispersion of sugar necessitates the employment of monochromatic light.]

1913 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 212 261 (title) Optical rotatory dispersion.—Part I. The natural and magnetic rotatory dispersion in quartz of light in the visible region of the spectrum.

1965 Tetrahedron 13 3121 The optical rotatory dispersion of seven other transoid dienes has been determined.

1991 D. W. H. Rankin et al. Struct. Methods in Inorg. Chem. (ed. 2) 296 A spectrum in which the magnitude of rotation for a particular enantiomer is plotted against the wavelength of the light is called an Optical Rotatory Dispersion (ORD) spectrum.

1962 Proc. Symp. Optical Char. Recognition i. 16 (caption) An example of the actual printed output which optical scanners are required to read.

1991 ABA Jrnl. June 74/3 Judge Strand's courtroom even has an optical scanner so that hard-copy documents brought into court can quickly be converted onto disk.

1953 Science 23 Oct. 653/1 A technique involving optical scanning..makes the measurement easier and..more accurate.

1971 Computers & Humanities 5 282 Optical scanning of printed texts (avoiding the need for keypunching the material).

1988 A. J. B. Anderson Interpreting Data (1990) (BNC) 154 Optical scanning devices have become increasingly used for data capture..via some sort of bar coding system.

1933 B. Brown Amateur Talking Pict. vii. 146 The optical sound system of the R.C.A. portable is shown diagrammatically.]

1960 McGraw-Hill Encycl. Sci. & Technol. III. 124/2 The magnetic sound track is..26 frames ahead [of the picture] on 16-mm film, the same as optical sound.

1990 French Rev. 63 1083 ‘Annexes’..provide both technical information (physics of light, chemistry of color film, basics of optical sound and Dolby A, etc.) and practical data.

1853 W. T. Brande Dict. Sci., Lit. & Art (ed. 3) 1205/1 For the purpose of tracing the perpendicular, the simple cross-staff may be employed; but the instrument called the optical square (which is merely a small, shallow, circular box containing the two principal glasses of the sextant fixed at an angle of 45°) will effect the purpose with greater accuracy.

1950 J. Clendinning Princ. & Use Surv. Instruments (1972) ii. 10 The optical square..is somewhat more convenient than the cross staff for setting out a line at right angles to another.

1984 A. Bannister & S. Raymond Surveying (ed. 5) ii. 13 The prismatic type of optical square employs a pentagonal-shaped prism.

1965 Jrnl. Appl. Physics 36 868/2 The optical switch shown in Fig. 1 operates directly on the laser pulse by abruptly cutting it off when a selected power level is reached.

1996 Amer. Scientist July 338/2 Some investigators believe that self-assembled quantum dots could be used as optical switches.

1976 Appl. Physics Lett. 28 719 (title) Optical transistor.

1993 Sci. Amer. June 46/1 The same difficulty has plagued the development of nonlinear optical devices... Such switches have occasionally been termed ‘optical transistor’, a label that misconstrues the principles of transistor action.

1986 N.Y. Times 13 July i. 1/2 The scientists expect to be able to manipulate atoms one at a time with the laser technique, using it as optical tweezers.

2002 Nature 12 Sept. 125/3 One of the most impressive effects of (gaussian) optical tweezers is in the study of molecular motors and polymer mechanics.

2013 G. K. Knopf & Y. Otani Optical Nano & Micro Actuator Technol. xvii. 524 The manipulation of single cells and subcellular components in biology is achieved by optical trapping or optical tweezers.

1971 Proc. Royal Soc. A. 322 529 An optical trap was affixed to the saturation chamber in order to reduce the back-scattered light.

1978 Physical Rev. Lett. 41 1363/2 They can be used to construct optical traps and ‘bottles’ for neutral atoms.

1994 Jrnl. Mod. Optics 41 595 (title) Measurement of the optical force and trapping range of a single-beam gradient optical trap for micron-sized latex spheres.