ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         The Northern Lights which had drawn them from 
          their childhood beds in lower latitudes on so many 
          deep winter nights, while summoning in their parents 
          obscure feelings of dread, could now be viewed up 
          here at any time from within, at altitude, in heavenwide 
          pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and 
          colonades of light and current, in transfiguration 
          unceasing. AtD 121/122

          A heavenwide blast of light. AtD 779

"Heavenwide pulses of color", "A heavenwide blast of light".

The Chums are drawn to light unceasing: "Soon they will put on smoked 
goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky." AtD 1085

          Many materials are optically active.

          Stack two polaroid lenses on top of each other, noting 
          what can be seen through the lenses as one is rotated 
          compared to the other.  (The lenses of SOME inexpensive 
          sun glasses can be carefully popped free allowing the 
          glasses to be restored after the investigation.)

          Place transparent materials such as clear tape partially 
          between the stacked polaroid film.  Note some material 
          may rotate the transmitted polarized light changing the
          intensity of light passing through the stack.  Other
          transparent materials may not be optically active.  
          Which materials are optically active?

          How are colored light effected by the optically active 
          material?  (A collage of active material may produce 
          interesting effects?)

          Investigate how a glucose or fructose sugar solution 
          placed between the stacked polaroid filters effects transmission.

http://homepage.mac.com/dtrapp/ePhysics.f/labIV_5.html

The book is forcing me to recurse my years in intermediate school, 1968-1969. 
Mr. Nichols, my science teacher, invited me to play with a kit of polarizing 
filters and crystals, ostensibly for some science project that, alas, failed to 
materialize. It was one of the most psychedelic experiences in a life not 
lacking in that sort of persuit. I'd place some thin slice of Mica between two 
polarizing filters, rotate the two thin polarizing filters in opposite 
directions (quite a feat, as I recall, very clumsy but do-able), and the colors 
would ripple and flow "in transfiguration unceasing". It worked at its very best 
if you aimed the filter/crystal/filter right at the sun, absolutely 
"Contre-jour". Of course, polarizing filters are all about photography:

http://www.photofilter.com/index.html?gclid=CPrM74zYiIsCFRbjYAodanPqHA

(top of the page, very first thing to come up on Google, so mathematically 
speaking, it's the obvious first reference for anything to do with "polarizing 
filter".)

Although the  use of "Against the Day" as a photographic concept might 
not be the first thing to pop up on our traverse web, by translating the phrase 
into Contre-jour and searching for images you get:

http://www.art-logic.info/annecy/IMG/jpg/bouquetin-contre-jour.jpg

http://tinyurl.com/3drstx

http://tinyurl.com/2p2upg

http://tinyurl.com/2poqup

The camera is aimed into the Sun (this usually requires a filter to begin with) 
and very often the central object in the photo obscures---blocks---the sun/the 
source. It often works out that the source is the sun. Now, I realise that this
is a big, big stretch, but somehow the muted posthorn comes to mind, the 
blocking of the revelation, those powers that restrain the day of judgement.

          Manoeuvring in vessels camouflaged in naval-style 
          "dazzle painting" whereby areas of the structure 
          could actually disappear and reappear in clouds of 
          chromatic twinkling, scientist-skyfarers industriously 
          gathered their data, all of deepest interest to the 
          enterprisers convened leagues below, at intelligence 
          centers on the surface such as the Inter-Group 
          Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation 
          (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational clearing-house in Northern 
          Alaska, which these days was looking more like some 
          Lloyd's of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting 
          anxiously for the next fateful Lutine announcement.
          AtD, 122

          They blasted down to L.A., heading back to the barn 
          only semivisible and near as anybody could tell, 
          unobserved, Manuel and his auto alchemy team at 
          Zero Profile Paint & Body of Santa Rosa having come 
          up with a proprietary lacquer of a crystalline 
          microstructure able to vary its index of refraction so 
          that even had there been surveillance, the Trans-Am 
          could easily, except for a few iridescent fringes, have 
          been taken for empty roadway. Vineland, 192

What strikes me about the resonance of these two passages, is the use of 
polarized light (in this case to make things apparentlly "dissapear"), and 
polarized light is the storytelling tissue that connects:

          . . . .The Penhallow money came from Iceland spar---they 
          owned extensive deposits all over the Arctic, having been 
          crystal tycoons since the first Penhallows arrived in Iceland 
          late in the seventeenth century as part of a calcite rush set 
          off by the famous arrival of the double of the double-refracting 
          mineral in Copenhagen by way of a sailor who'd discovered 
          some near the Bay of Roeford.

          When the Vormance Expedition arrived, Constance's 
          grandson, Hunter Penhallow. . . .
          AtD,128/129

Both Penhallows are more than simply touched by Iceland spar, they are
soaking in it. And Hunter's peregrinations through time may have more 
than a little to do with karmically rubbing up against the stuff too often.

          Bartholinus sees double (1669)

          Iceland Spar was involved in the official discovery of 
          polarization. This naturally occurring transparent crystal 
          (optical quality Calcite, CaCO3) separates an image into 
          two displaced images when looked through in certain 
          directions. In 1669, a Danish mathematician at the 
          University of Copenhagen, Erasmus Bartholinus, 
          not only saw double, but also performed some 
          experiments and wrote a 60-page memoir about 
          the results. This was the first scientific description 
          of a polarization effect (the images are polarized 
          perpendicular to each other), and for his efforts 
          he may be considered the discoverer of this hidden 
          property of light.

Yes, I know this is quite  recursive, but note again the filling-in of details, 
the Copenhagen connection, to start with. . . .
          
          "Beware of living during interesting times," says the 
          Chinese adage. The young Etienne Louis Malus 
          didn't loose his head during the French revolution 
          nor during the Reign of Terror, but had to follow the 
          Napoleon army in its invasion of Egypt. He participated 
          in the campaigns in Palestine and Syria, where he 
          contracted the plague that would finally kill him some 
          years later. But he had time to make several important 
          contributions to the understanding of polarization.His 
          most crucial discovery came when he was playing 
          with a crystal of Iceland Spar in his apartment at the 
          Rue d'Enfer (literally, Street of Hell) in Paris. He looked 
          at the reflections of the setting sun from a window of the 
          Luxemburg Palace across the street and noticed how the 
          intensity varied when he rotated the crystal (the image of 
          the sun is partially polarized upon reflection). He followed 
          this with some more experiments showing that the ability 
          to polarize light was not restricted to very special crystals 
          but could be present in reflections from any ordinary 
          substance, transparent or opaque, except for polished 
          metals. He came up with the Malus law that predicts 
          the intensity of the light transmitted through a polarizer 
          when the angle of the transmission changes (square law).

http://www.polarization.com/history/history.html

. . . .or Etienne Louis Malus' residence on Rue d'Enfer (literally, Street of 
Hell) in Paris. 

Here's a bonus link of:

Modern History Sourcebook: Sir WilliamThomson (Lord Kelvin) 
(1824-1907): Wave Theory Of Light, 1884

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884kelvin-light.html

Can't say i've found the ultimate McGuffin here, but there's lots on 
"luminiferous ether" and Iceland spar, for those willing to tough it out.

These scientific artifacts suggest that light beams are somehow split, that some 
sort of "stuff" is involved in the doubling witnessed in Iceland spar, very 
similar to the purpose of the Tesla Device in the movie "The Prestige", where 
duplicates, virtual clones are created by this splitting. 

          The first clues to the existence of polarized light surfaced around 
          1669 when Erasmus Bartholin discovered that crystals of the 
          mineral Iceland spar (more commonly referred to as calcite) 
          produce a double image when objects are viewed through the 
          crystals in transmitted light. During his experiments, Bartholin 
          also observed a quite unusual phenomenon. When the calcite 
          crystals are rotated about their axis, one of the images moves 
          in a circle around the other, providing strong evidence that the 
          crystals are somehow splitting the light into two different beams.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/polarizedlighthome.html