Holography Handbook: Making Holograms the Easy Way

Scientific American“The Amateur Scientist” section.“Holography Handbook: Making Holograms The Easy Way by Fred Unterseher, Jeannene Hansen and Bob Schlesinger, is rich in detail about how to produce all kinds of hologram on a limited budget.”************************************Library Journal“This comprehensive book is a guide for non-technical people who wish to create their own holograms. Although holograms involve complex scientific principles, the authors describe and illustrate practical methods suitable for a “handy” person at a relatively modest cost. Explicit information is given on equipment required and where to get it, how to construct optical tables, and how to make and display various types of holograms. A clear style and many explanatory diagrams and illustrations make the projects easy to follow. For those interested in theory the authors provide a section with a commonsense approach. Another section relating holography to the human brain and to cosmology will intrigue many who have an interest beyond the mechanics of holograms. Recommended.************************************Booklist“For the amateur holographer, the authors of this practical manual emphasize a simple and easy method of creating three-dimensional laser photographs. Although some information on laser technology and holographic theory is included, the book in general supplies step-by-step instructions on holography basics and identifies elementary equipment and supplies. More complex techniques are described but not detailed in depth. A real hologram is to be included in each copy. Suppliers and resource addresses are noted. *************************************New Scientist“The Holography Handbook coincides with the increasing interest in making hologram by individuals with little or no technical background. It serves to educate and is supremely capable of doing so, by explaining in readable and succinct terms how to make numerous different holograms. The illustrations, diagrams and text take you gently through each step, including: the selection of a location to make holograms, how to build or where to acquire the equipment needed, what to do with it once you have it, for how long, and the results to expect. It covers basic and advanced procedures, recommends approaches both optically and chemically and offers alternatives.This would make a useful handbook if it stopped there, but its authors recognize that the process is connected, and can be extended, to other areas of consideration, sot they quickly put it into historical perspective including chapters on light, its perception and properties , the art of holography and philosophical implications. The California humor of its authors comes though with a desire to provide entertaining and understandable explanations, manifest in their “KISS philosophy. Keep It Sweet and Simple”. In a book concerned with the production of holograms and their properties, the simplest way to demonstrate some of the points covered in the text would be to give each reader a hologram to examine - hence the sting in the tail. On the last page is a small embossed hologram, viewable in white light (a characteristic of most display holography today), which if you light it correctly, provides a 3-dimensional image. Previous publications have included holograms, but this is the first to explain how to make them yourself. To further emphasize the well though-out nature of this book, the back page, if you can bear to tear it out, can be cut, folded and glued to make a stand for the hologram. Any lending library adventurous enough to offer copies of this book would do well to keep a beady eye on the back page prone, as it will be to mysterious disappearance. Seductive things, these holograms.”Andrew Pepper

The truly amazing thing about holography today is that average people are setting up labs in their own homes and creating holograms as advanced as many of those coming from high technology labs. Breakthroughs are coming not just from the research labs but from the average people as well. It is as though the telescope had just been invented and anyone that wanted could get one. The field is almost totally unexplored and so it is not difficult to make new discoveries.