Fermat’s principle

1 · Erik Bernhardsson · May 21, 2013, 4 a.m.
I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat’s principle. And suddenly something came back to me that I’ve been trying to suppress for many years – how I never understood why there’s anything fundamental about the principal of least time. The principle of least time states that the light will travel from A to B in such a way that the time is minimized. Using this principle you can derive a whole bunch of optics laws. But to me that doesn’t make an...