How are holograms possible?

3d scenes on 2d film, and a diffraction lesson along the way.

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Hologram credits:

The Microscope is by Walter Spierings, 1984

Donations Hologram by Cherry Optical Holography

Lucy in a Tin Hat is by Patrick Keown Boyd, 1988

The Star Wars-themed Direct-Write Digital Holograms were produced by Zebra Imaging.

The 'Shakespeare' embossed animated integral hologram was made by Applied Holographics.

Walter Spierings, who did the microscope, is from Dutch Holographic Laboratory. He wanted me to let you know that anyone should feel free to approach them when it comes to producing holograms, they do a lot of innovative things with the medium: www.holoprint.com

Thanks to everyone who helped with this project:

Paul Dancstep, for help writing, and for all the 3d modeling

Craig Newswanger and Sally Weber, for making the central hologram shown

Kurt Bruns, for the artwork of Dennis Gabor

Phoebe Tooke, Wayne Grim, and Rick Danielson, for filming at the exploratorium

Quinn Brodsky and Mithuna Yoganathan, for footage of lasers through diffraction gratings

Vince Rubinetti, for writing the music

Cliff Stoll for the Klein Bottle

Small correction: After the algebra in the end, I say "We don't even make assumptions about R", but that's not quite true. To treat |R^2| as some scaling factor in the expression |R^2| * O, it matters that the amplitude of R is approximately constant around a given point.

Gabor's Nobel Prize lecture:

A few resources we found helpful for this video

Seeing the Light, by Falk, Brill, and Stork

Practical Holography, by Saxby and Zarcharovas

Principles of Holography by Howard Smith

Timestamps

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These animations are largely made using a custom Python library, manim. See the FAQ comments here:

All code for specific videos is visible here:

The music is by Vincent Rubinetti.

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3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. If you're reading the bottom of a video description, I'm guessing you're more interested than the average viewer in lessons here. It would mean a lot to me if you chose to stay up to date on new ones, either by subscribing here on YouTube or otherwise following on whichever platform below you check most regularly.

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