Leaving Certificate Physics Notes: Optics
- Patrick Murphy
- Aug 28, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Oct 26, 2024
Keywords: Leaving Certificate study notes, Leaving Certificate Physics notes, Optics, Physics, Leaving Certificate, Light Behavior, Reflection, Refraction, Lenses, Mirrors, Optical Phenomena, Wave Optics
Keywords: Leaving Certificate study notes, Leaving Certificate Physics notes, Optics, Physics, Leaving Certificate, Light Behavior, Reflection, Refraction, Lenses, Mirrors, Optical Phenomena, Wave Optics
Gary | PSA Method ：These notes make optics feel much easier to revise, especially by keeping reflection, refraction, lenses, and mirrors in one place. I like that it focuses on the key ideas students are likely to need for exams.
The way optics gets examined, it’s basically “draw clean, label properly, don’t panic,” more than doing heavy maths. I used to rewrite the lens diagrams as a tiny flow: choose lens, draw principal axis, mark F and 2F, then rays—kept me from skipping steps. Funny enough, building little routines like that is the same mindset I use when I’m picking outfits on StyleLookLab, because having a sequence stops you overthinking it.
The section on dispersion is the one I always needed an extra example for—like explicitly connecting it to why white light splits in a prism but not (as much) in glass blocks at normal incidence. If you ever add worked exam-style questions, one on apparent depth would be class because it shows up a lot. Not sure why, but I was reminded of how directories categorize stuff when I stumbled on https://hrefgo.com the other day, and it made me think a simple “topic map” for optics would help revision.
I like that you keep reflection/refraction grounded in the actual ray rules, because it’s easy to memorise them without understanding what the rays are “doing.” The mirrors vs lenses comparison also helped me stop mixing up where to put the focal point on sketches. Totally unrelated, but seeing “wave optics” mentioned reminded me of how different styles can change how you perceive an image—like ghibli ai does in a fun way—anyway, back to trying to nail down those diagram marks.
One thing I wish more notes stressed is sign conventions when you’re using the lens/mirror equation—half my silly mistakes were just mixing up u and v. Also, the link between refraction and why lenses work is a nice way to make it feel like one topic instead of separate chapters. When I was revising I used a quick playback speed calculator tool to plan how long video lessons would take at 1.5x, and it helped me keep momentum without rushing the diagrams.