Randomness in complex media

Randomness is not always the enemy. It can serve many purposes where materials sciences and optical sciences meet. Among those purposes are these. It can provide the raw material for self-organization. It can 'uniformize' optical properties. It can make manufacturing easier. It can assure a great deal of noise immunity. Although most cases exhibit all of those features, we can illustrate them with examples in which one tends to dominate the other.