General Three-Stage Description

From the physical processes of rubber abrasion and its mathematic description, it can be deduced that a general process of rubber abrasion might be regarded as consisting of three stages and expressed correspondingly in terms of a wear curve (Figure A) ... 

Typically, books on optics explain the principles of the various optical experiments and instrumentation.1 41 The first section of this book, while dedicated to optics will be limited to a description of the general formula of wave and the phenomena of refraction, reflection, interference, diffraction, and polarization. An overview of the fundamentals of optics presented in this section is shown in Table 1.1. Most books on optics begin the explanation of the wave by stating Maxwell s equations, and this is most appropriate, no doubt. Here we tried to follow a different approach in order to set the stage for the description of the radiation theory in the next section. However in explaining optical phenomena, it is impossible to avoid the concept of wave. So, in this section, although reluctant to do so, we introduce the equation of the three-dimensional plane wave. 

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