Professor Sir Michael Berry, FRS, FRSE Cormack Lecture 2004 Focussing in the Sky 26 April 2004 at the

e Royal Society of Edinburgh Introduction Although I was honoured when John Brown approached me to give this lecture, I felt awkward about accepting, because Im not an astronomer. Therefore I feel the need to start by declaring my interest.. Most scientists - especially astronomers - use light to see things. Light from all regions of the spectrum streams down from the sky - sometimes a flood of rays, abundantly informative, sometimes a trickle of photons, precious conveyors of subtle information. Getting this information is not my main interest. Rather, Im an enthusiast of light itself, and the natural phenomena and observations Ill show you tonight are interesting to me because they provide opportunities for light to display all possibilities allowed by the laws of optics to express the physics of light. Although this lecture comes at the end of a meeting primarily for astronomers, it is a public lecture, so technicalities are not appropriate, and there will hardly be any. But I cant ignore the fact that there are professionals here, and at the very end there will be a rising physics gradient, and one or two formulas illustrating a new idea. The general strategy will be to start from Earth and move outwards. Topics covered. (In the lecture, these were illustrated with photographs and computer simulations, and passages from literature showing how novelists or poets observed the same phenomena). - Sparkling of the Sun on the sea. Each brilliant point is a reflection of the sun. Over time, the points appear or disappear in pairs. Each such event (twinkle) corresponds to passage through the eye of a caustic, that is, a moving surface of focused light. Caustics play a central role in the lecture. The rapid succession of twinkles, usually too fast to follow individually, causes the sparkling. - Raindrop caustics. When out in the rain at night wearing glasses, caustics to be seen in the weirdlydistorted images of distant lights. The distortions are caused by refraction in irregular water-droplet lenses on the lenses. - Swimming-pool caustics. Sunlight is refracted by waves on a swimming-pool into caustic surfaces in the water, visible as bright dancing lines where they intersect the bottom. - Twinkling stars. The turbulent atmosphere generates the equivalent of swimming-pool caustics in starlight. Refraction by air is weak, so the multiple images are too close to see with the unaided eye, but caustics crossing the eye cause stars intensity to fluctuate. With large telescopes, starlight caustics can be seen directly, by looking at a bright twinkling star near the horizon under high magnification and then defocussing. - Catastrophe theory. The strange curved and cusped shapes of caustic are classified by the mathematics of catastrophe theory. The classification restricts the shapes that can occur naturally (that is, in the absence of symmetry). This enables certain apparent forms in swimming-pool caustic patterns to be unmasked as artefacts of poor resolution. The fully-resolved forms can be predicted by the mathematics and then seen in careful experiments. - Rainbows. These are caustics in sunlight reflected and refracted by raindrops. Each drop bends sunlight into a tiny bright cone, and we see, brightly lit, all the drops on whose cones our eyes lie. - The green flash. Sunlight is bent by the earths atmosphere, which acts as a giant lens. Air is dispersive, so the lens has chromatic aberration (colour distortion). This makes the red sun set before the green sun, which is briefly visible as a momentary gleam at the moment of sunset, if the air is still enough. - Eclipses of the Moon. The Earth-atmosphere lens focusses light near the Moon, giving some illumination when the Moon moves into the Earths shadow. This reddish light reveals the integrated sunrises and sunsets on the Earth at the same time. - Mars caustic. On 8 April 1976, Mars eclipsed the star epsilon Geminorum, and the diminution of its light (lasting about 6 minutes) was observed on Earth by an airborne observatory. Marss atmosphere focusses some of the starlight onto a line, observed on Earth as a bright flash during the eclipse. The fact that the Mars lens is ellipsoidal rather than spherical implies that according to catastrophe theory the symmetry is broken and the central line is really a four-cusped caustic; this fine detail was seen in the central flash (lasting about 2 seconds). - Caustic-touching theorem. In the images of extended objects, rather than individual points, the boundaries are distorted. An example is the wiggly reflections of ships masts in wavy water. The images are disrupted as well as distorted, in the sense that individual boundary curves are broken up into several distinct curves (topology change). Disruption can be understood by considering false light, imagined as

emerging from the eye. The false light is focussed onto caustic surfaces near the distant object. When the caustic of the false light touches the boundary of the object, the image in the true light is being disrupted. - Gravitational lensing. According to general relativity, mass bends light, giving space a refractive index that varies with the gravitational potential. This causes light from distant astronomical objects to be distorted by the gravity of intervening objects, giving rise to the analogues of multiply-reflected sun images on water. On finer scales, there are unresolved multiple images (microlensing), detectable as spikes in the objects intensity over time the analogue of twinkling starlight. - Wave effects near caustics. Focal lines and surfaces are decorated by patterns of wave interference that are also classified by catastrophe theory. These wave phenomena have not yet been seen in gravitational lensing, but estimates predict effects on a variety of scales, largest near caustics. Unlike geometric gravitational lensing, interference depends on frequency and so might be detected as spectral distortions of gravitationally-lensed objects.