Reflections and polerization

[kiwi133]

I thought the university would be a fitting place for this.

Anybody here have polerized sun glasses?

Anybody ever notice how rotating them while looking at your car causes reflections to fade in and out?

Anybody ever get embarrased when you realized somebody was stareing at you bobbing your head from side to side while looking at your car? :o



Hehe, well I got curious again and took some shots of my freshly winterized car on top of lot 6 at College park.



Top pic is normal, middle pic is taken through my glasses tilted vertical, bottom pic is taken through my glasses as horizontal.



Anyway just thought I would open up a discussion on polerization for whatever anyone wants to through in.



one last thing, that bottom pic looks like crazy paint scheme! Where`d the blue go?! :cool:



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v498/kiwi133/polerize.jpg

[sbkang]

Nicely explained here:



http://travel.howstuffworks.com/sunglass4.htm

[AlanP]

Take a look in any freshman physics book.



Reflected light is partially polarized, to some degree. At one special angle, the Brewster angle, the reflected light is ENTIRELY polarized. Thus, observing reflected light through polaroid sunglasses will show more or less intensity depending on the angle between the electric field of the reflected light and the polarization axis of the sunglasses. At the Brewster angle, this effect becomes the most pronounced.



Of course, you can make the same observation for light scattered from a body of water.