I’ve been interested in optics for many years, ever since I started building my own telescopes at age 11 and began writing ray-tracing software in my early twenties.  But one thing that I haven’t experimented with too much is polarization, probably because my self-educated view of light is mostly in the form of little billiard balls called photons, and understanding polarization requires understanding quantum mechanics, and while I’m not completely ignorant of that stuff, I must admit it seems mostly baffling, and haven’t worked hard to figure it out since modeling polarization in computer graphics has been (mostly) of limited utility.

So, I found Jeri’s video pretty cool.  She demonstrates a type of optical device that I’d never seen before, which is always cool.  Check it out.

As a tiny bit of value added, I thought I’d add a video demonstrating a polarization effect shattered my early feeling that I understood what polarization worked: the three polarizer experiment.  A little YouTube by minutephysics has a nice video demonstration of the effect and uses it to introduce Bell’s theorem: