ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Carvill John]

One in a series of great posts Robin. Definitely reckon polarisation is 
highly relevant.

If you extend the ability of Iceland Spar to split beams of light, to 
suggest that it can also split beams of being, creating not parallel but 
tangential worlds/realities/whatever - and I think Pynchon does suggest 
that, in the current section - then if the world, or reality, can be so 
split, cannot those divergent worlds themselves then be split, and those, 
and those, etc. until you have as many strands as you care to 
imagine........


>From: robinlandseadel@

>
>          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
>
.
[snip]
.
.>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

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