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What are Polarizers?

 

  • Polarizers are used in fancy sunglasses.
    Cool polarizers.

  • Polarizers are used in 3D-movie glasses.

  • Put on a pair of inexpensive cardboard 3D-glasses or movie polarizer glasses.  What do you see?  Anything funny?  It might help to close one eye and then the other, and look at shiny things.  More on this later...

  • Wink at your friend.

 

  • Wink at your friend.

 

  • If you have two pairs of polarizer glasses; and have a friend and you put them on, and wink at each other what do you see?  Now stand still and have your friend slowly tilt their head from side to side and look at each other with one eye closed.  What you see is called crossing polarizers.  If you make your own polarizers from gel glue you will understand why this happens, otherwise you will have to wait until you take physics and optics to find out why.
    Wink at your friend.Crossing two polarizers.

  • To see that polarizers are important to modern day life put on your polarizer glasses and go on a high-tech scavenger hunt.  Remember that to detect a polarizer you should tilt your head from side to side or take off the glasses and rotate them to see the effect of crossing two polarizers.  Look at LCDs (Liquid Crystal Display) in watches, pagers, wireless telephones, portable computers, etc.  They are all polarizers!  A lot of scientists and engineers work to make and improve these devices.  Can you name a few?
    Crossing a polarizer in front of your watch!Crossing a polarizer in front of your computer.

  • Though Edwin Land invented the plastic version of polarizers in his apartment in the early 1930's, remember that polarizers are everywhere.  To see this just go outside and rotate your polarizers.  You will see that just about all things that reflect light are polarizers.  This reflected light is commonly called glare or polarized light and thus polarizer glasses are sold to increase driving and boating safety by reducing its blinding effect.  Can you find the biggest source of polarized light?  Does this have anything to do with why the blank is blue and the blank is orange?  Now try looking at things inside with your glasses.
    Light reflected onto a projector screen.Cool polarizers.

Want to learn more about Polarizers?

 

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Friday, October 12, 2007

jsal at utep dot edu