The person I referred to was making a HeNe laser simply because she could. I don't think she had any interest in actually making a hologram with it. I met her at an SPIE meeting around 88 or 89, and she was then an artist but she was interested in holography, but when I asked her whether she built the laser to make holograms with, I got the feeling that this never occurred to her.Joe Farina wrote:I would never recommend that someone build a laser for holography, unless this person is equally (and perhaps more) interested in laser construction. Commercial lasers (I've always purchased surplus or second hand), which have a proven track record of success in holography, are best.
However, this does bring up an interesting point I was discussing with Joy (wife) this morning. We have a number of lasers that could be induced to fire if the right person simply wanted to play with them awhile, including a 125 with two power supplies. She maintains that it'd be useful for someone to simply play around and try and get it going. However, it seems that no one simply plays around with stuff the way we used to. My neighbour, in his late 70's was a banker, yet in his youth used to fix TV sets. As you've all mentioned, a lot of people with little or no formal technical education or training got the Amateur Scientist and played around with building lasers and atom smashers(!!!). I remember that friends used to get "Practical Electronics" and build stuff like bio-feedback devices and circuits that put a bunch of lines on a TV set. But today, it seems, people simply want to tap an app and satisfy instant gratification. I wondered when it all changed. I proposed that the change occurred when devices largely moved away from hardware into primarily software. Software, of course, is a little harder to play around with. I wonder if holography hobbyists also belong to this generation of people willing to play around with techno stuff simply for the gratification of seeing something come alive ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qNeGSJaQ9Q )