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in partnership with the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust

 

Optics

Optics is an area of physics which looks at how light behaves and how we can observe it. 

This usually involves using mirrors and lenses to magnify, focus, and direct the path of light.

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There is an illustration of a bulging lens on the left. A dashed line runs through the centre across the image. Two red parallel lines hit the lens towards the top and bottom and then become diagonal, crossing paths at a point labelled "F" some distance after the lens. This distance is noted with a black arrow labelled "f'".
Credit
This work by JiPaul (based on work by Henrik) is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International
Light (red lines) passing through a convex lens. The point at which the light meets (F') is called the focus. The distance from the lens to the focus (f') is called the focal length.

Waves

We are all familiar with waves; from ripples on the surface of a pond to the swell of the ocean. A wave is just a regular vibration that travels through something, like air or water. 

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Ripples on the surface of still water, caused by an object or disturbance, spreading out in concentric circles
Credit
This work by Pixabay is licensed under Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal

Gravitational Lensing

Space is not flat. It is 3D, and we say that everything in it is held together on an imaginary surface we call spacetime. The idea of spacetime was put forward in Einstein's theory of relativity.

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A white meshed grid against a black background. Three spheres of different size and mass sit on the grid, appearing to distort the grid beneath it. The largest sphere is yellow and causes the most distortion, with the next smallest being orange that causes less distortion. A red sphere is the smallest, with the mesh around it barely being distorted.
Credit
This work by ESA–C.Carreau is licensed under Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
Artists impression visualising space-time being distorted by three spheres with different masses.