''That Can't Possibly Be Right!" Lessons Learned in Software Modeling

Modern optical engineering software has become very powerful and capable over the past 30 years, but the user must be knowledgeable about what the software is trying to say. In this paper, four examples of a complete misunderstanding of the software are presented with comments. Finally the story of the optical analysis of the ALPHA laser is presented as an example of initially not recognizing the significance of a software modeling result, and then realizing the mistake and correcting it months later.