Saturday 29 January 2011

colourfast or ghost of laundry future

From the balcony, I have noticed that one of my favourite sweaters, zebra-striped that maybe makes me look like a mime or the Hamburgler, has a strange optical effect reflected in the window. The equally-sized black and white stripes become half as thick and are boarded by grey ones. The photograph is a little bleary but the effect is visible, I think.  Perhaps this is a form of polarization caused by the double panes of glass or my dousing the windows with Windex and calling them spotless. Weird quantum characteristics of light and shadow are shaken out when one starts to meddling with the whole business with refraction.
One experiment, which I always found maddening and counter-intuitive but I do not think others are so easily impressed, is that two polarized lenses never fully cancel one another out, as I’d expect: each only lets 50% of light through and rotating the other around, even when the filter is at a right angle, perpendicular to the other, still lets 25% of the light to sneak through in as a particle-wave prankster.