Polarizer Magic

Polarization is such a cool and surprising bit of physics to learn about. One of the things that I love about it is that the materials are fairly cheap and students can interact in real time for full class investigations and demos.

One of the things that I was bummed about during the online learning of COVID is that students would never get to see what it looked like to look through a polarized filter. Then, during our google meet, I tried holding a filter up to my webcam and it was not only good, but in some ways, it was actually a cooler experience than when I had done it in person ;)

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Pirate Polarizers

If you've ever gone to a 3D movie in the theaters, you've had the opportunity to experience polarized 3D glasses. Now, these lenses are circularly polarized which is a slightly different technology than the linearly polarized lens that we talk about in class but for this demonstration, it doesn't really make a difference.

I've collected a handful of pairs of these glasses over the years and now I have enough for each table in my classroom to explore. Since each lens is polarized to let different a different orientation in, looking at someone through a polarized filter blocks out one eye but not the other and rotating the filter 90° switches eyes. If you have two students that are each wearing 3D glasses, one of them can cover up (or close) one of their eyes and magically their partner turns into a "pirate" with one lens blacked out. Pretty cool! :)

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