[Physics] Can you explain Fermat’s Principle to me

opticsvariational-principle

The textbook(F.A.Jenkins and H.E.White Fundamentals of Optics) states that the Fermat's principle is that

the path taken by a light ray in going from one point to another through any set of media is such as to render its optical path equal, in the first approximation, to other paths closely adjacent to the actual one.

To be honest, I can't understand that description. But I know that

the actual ray path between two points is the one for which the optical path length is stationary with respect to variations of the path.

Are the two descriptions same?

Best Answer

They are equivalent.

The formal study of this kind of problem is called "The Calculus of Variations", and it requires that you have some level of understanding of integration and of partial derivatives.

You may imagine parameterizing the path taken in any way you want, say $$\vec{f}(t;\, \alpha,\beta,\delta,\dots)$$ where the function describes the position of the light ray at time $t$ and $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\delta$ etc are a set of numbers from which you build the path that you are proposing to take (perhaps they represent the angles the light takes through each material in the way). Then you find the arrival time $T$ such that $f(T;\dots) = \text{destination}$ and plot $T$ as a function of the parameters $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\delta$ etc.

The arrival time $T$ will have it's smallest value for the set of parameters that describe the path that is actually taken.

But this kind of math has certain limitations and one of them is that it doesn't actually know the difference between maximum and minimum (nor indeed can it tell either of those apart from "inflection points" which I'm not going to explain but you should have heard of if you have studies some calculus).1 Formally it is said to yield a "stationary action".


1 There are several questions around the site about manipulations of the "Lagrangian" to cause the physical path to occur at a maximum instead of a minimum, which is equivalent.

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