Learning Optics in Nature’s School

For as long as there has been science, inspiration has been drawn from natural phenomena and structures. However, as branches of science mature, they develop an increasingly rich store of ideas, techniques and technology, and the tendency to search the realm of nature for inspiration diminishes. Optics is certainly one of the oldest branches of science, and many of its practitioners perhaps imagine that most of what could be learnt from nature was learned in the epochs of Newton, Grimaldi, Young and Fresnel. However, with increasing maturity come new tools with which we may look more closely at some of nature’s more subtle structures, and discover new things hidden from previous explorers. The emerging field of optical biomimetics seeks to examine structures in living systems, to understand how they deliver optical effects, and perhaps, to discover new designs arrived at by evolution which may be applied in technology.