How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser

Author:David Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Sarfatti tried to interest new patrons, Nick Herbert entered the superluminal fray with a design of his own. Herbert aimed to exploit differences between various polarizations of light. Classically, polarization refers to the direction in which a light wave’s electric field varies. The field may vary along a straight line (“linear polarization”), oscillating up and down and up and down as the wave speeds on its way. Or the electric field may spin around in a circle (“circular polarization”), tracing out a helical shape as the light wave travels.26 (Fig. 9.2.) For each type of polarization, light waves can come in one of two varieties. Linearly polarized light, for example, can be polarized either horizontally—its electric field waving back and forth in the horizontal direction—or vertically. The corkscrew pattern of circularly polarized light, meanwhile, can be either right-handed or left-handed. (Hold out both of your hands, stick out your thumbs, and curl your other fingers toward your palms. Your thumbs point in the direction that the light wave travels. The other fingers on your right hand curl in the direction that the electric field varies in right-circularly polarized light; likewise for the fingers on your left hand and left-circularly polarized light.)

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