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Old June 15th 09, 05:53 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Peter Cole[_2_]
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Posts: 4,572
Default Curious bicycle reflector incident

wrote:
Peter Cole wrote:


If you Google the terms "corner cube" and "cube corner" you'll find
that both are used to reference retro reflectors, but "corner cube"
is the more popular term. When I did laser interferometer
application design the term used was "corner cube".


Google is smart and knows that these backassward terms are used by
enough folks that they need search targets. It is the corner that
reflects and it is a cube corner into which light enters. When
working in retro reflectors, I was curious about the logic of the
reversed name given to the cube corner that is a trihedral corner.


Google isn't tagging these sites with synonyms, just indexing the text
they find as they crawl.

Apparently, "cube-corner" was the original term, but has been largely
replaced (even in technical books, and journals) by "corner cube". The
following abstract from 1987 is an example of the mixed use, presumably
the author used the more correct term in the body of the paper while
using the more popular term in the title so people could find the paper:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987SPIE..818..162F

"Retroreflector concepts - Corner-cube compared to catseye" -- Fuller,
Joseph B. C., Jr.

"A standard solid and open cube-corner retroreflector (CCR) is compared
with a catseye retroreflector (CER) in terms of field of view (FOV) and
expected wavefront errors."

It's not uncommon to see a paper using one term to reference one using
the other.
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