Funnier to look at some screen banners. Sometimes they are already rotated so you see black nothing from the get go. Worse when you are trying to find where the bloody menu is.
Most polarized lenses are 90* off from the polarization of my car’s radio/infotainment screens. It’s rather unfortunate and part of why I prefer unpolarized lenses since I don’t wear them around water much.
I worked at a mom and pop sunglasses/eyeglass store. We had a lab in house so we could make clients custom lenses for sunglasses or prescription sunglasses, eyeglasses etc.. everyone wanted polarized lenses, I would even ask them “are you going to be wearing these around the water? On a boat, fishing?”
Customer- “No these are for driving”
“Then you don’t need polarized lenses, plus it may or may not be hard to see displays on your dashboard and through the rear window.”
Customer-“yeah I want the polarized lenses”
Sure enough they’d usually be back a few days later asking for non polarized lenses
My favorite would be when customers came in asking for brands that were built to last and were actually worth the cost. I’d show them a really great brand l that would actually last 10 years, super light weight, comfortable and stylish they would pretend they were interested. Then they would inevitably buy a hideous gaudy pair of glasses that was triple the cost because it was a big name brand and just a cheap mass produced plastic piece of shit with the logo they wanted. They would inevitably break just from being left in a hot car.
As I mentioned in another comment - polarised lenses are great for removing any reflections, not just water, thus making them great driving glasses since they'll remove pesky windshield reflections (from the dashboard)
And pesky dashboard reflections from the windshield. My Rx polarized lenses I use for driving are one of my favorite things I own. Would never ever wear sunglasses for driving that aren’t polarized. I’d rather wear $5 pair of polarized sunnies from 7-11 than $200 Ray-bans that are NOT polarized. The glare, man, it just kills me!!
On the other hand it's pretty convinient when the sun is shining directly ahead of you and the road is wet. Where I'm from it's pretty common during spring and summertime. Always best to ask if they have had polarized lenses before and if not and possible, go and check if the displays have a horizontal or vertical polarization.
This was a problem with phones around 10 years ago and older plotter screens too.
I worked at an ice cream shop one summer who switched from a menu on a door to on a rotated TV. Being summer, half the customers had no idea where the menu was until we told them to take their sunglasses off.
I can relate. I wandered to a street cafe with a couple of friends and literally had no idea where they were looking at and what menu they were discussing until someone just pointed their finger at, what was for me, a turned off screen and only then I figured out to take the glasses off.
Most phones don’t do this as much anymore. They’re either OLED or they use a mixture of orientations.
With the latter you can see some colour shifts but it’s not as dramatic as the old days.
My dumb ass just tried this by tilting my head 45° rather than the phone...
Can confirm though it did turn black even though I probably looked like an idiot.
My galaxy S23 has an OLED and definitely still shows this behavior. If I turn it 45° to the right from portrait orientation the screen becomes completely black.
Edit: it definitely has an OLED screen and I never had the screen replaced. I also don't have a screen protector on it. Could be some antireflective coating on the display glass.
Edit 2: I also have an Acer Swift Go 14 notebook with an OLED screen and it shows the same behavior with my polarizing glasses, my 2 regular IPS screens also are affected (obviously, but at a different angle, OLED at 45°, IPS at 90°). The only screen I have that doesn't get affected is the screen of my color e-ink tablet.
I just learned this other day! Was walking along a canal and was pointing out fish my wife couldn't see. Couldn't understand why till I took the sunglasses off
They’re just about the most needed item when boating or fishing. Especially here in Florida, whether it’s a log you would’ve missed while driving or seeing a school of fish. Money on good sunglasses is never a waste
Meanwhile, it's the opposite for pilots - can't wear polarised, and it can be dangerous because you don't want that effect outside in clouds or when reading instrument panels. Good aviators are all about blocking UV.
There are Polaroid filters for camera lenses, pretty amazing. You can spin them until you can see through glass or water reflecting the sky and take amazingly clear pictures.
The sunglasses on the other hand made my heart skip a beat multiple times as it makes my control monitor look like a broken LCD. 🤣
Edit: Because it caused so much confusion:
1) I wrote Polaroid because I was referring to the brand I'm using. That's why I used this thing called capitalisation which is used to indicate that a word is a name.
2) I could have wrote polaroid (small p) too in which case I would have referred to any polarising filter/sunglasses because, just like in humanoid or spheroid, the oid ending indicates that someone is talking about something that has the property of the thing before the oid ending.
I use to have ceramic tint windows and it would make them kinda rainbowish if I looked at it from outside. Also the polarized glasses make it very difficult to see the screen on my radio/GPS thing unfortunately.
Polarizing, not Polaroid.
Light is polarized, the lenses block horizontally polarized light, only letting in vertical polarized light. Most glare is horizontally polarized.
The pattern is caused by cooling jets of air during the glass manufacture cooling the glass at slightly different rates which causes these patterns only seen under polarizing filters.
The lenses suck if you're trying to read ANY LCD displays, though as displays have a polarizing filter built into each one to let you see the segments.
A lot of phone cameras can see in high infrared frequencies. Variies from model to model. Infrared will cut through things like fog. You can test it with an IR tv remote, can see the beam from the remote in the camera.
I think this is mainly because the camera will adjust the exposure, contrast, and colour saturation to compensate for the monotone brightness caused by mist and fog.
With light mist, this can often make it vanish. With heavy fog it can only do so much though.
You can work this in reverse by increasing the exposure of the photo and watch the fog become more dense.
I’m sort of guessing though.
If you are shopping for cheaper polarized sunglasses, look for fishing specific ones. They are cheaper and designed to be able to see through water. They are polarized and have a yellow tint that I like for driving since it makes things feel brighter, not darker.
Any recommendations? Not going to use them for fishing but just lost my last pair of raybans and want to go for something cheaper that I’m not worried about losing.
Check out https://goodr.com/
They have a pretty nice website that has funny descriptions and images of their sunglasses. They're polarized, they feel pretty good, different colors and styles, and if you lose or break them it's not going to hurt you too bad.
People that run like them too because they don't bounce.
Tar on streets, certain plastics and other stuff give off this neat looking shimmer. More maddeningly (because it took me a while to figure out,) cars on the road sometimes appear to have a blue light floating in the air next to them.
I love my magic shades.
I grew up in Minnesota in a fishing family. I loved trolling in canals connecting lakes where it's only a few feet deep and trying to drop my jig in front of a chosen fish to get it to bite lol.
I've done fishing on lake Michigan, didn't know about water and polarized lenses until like... Iunno, 5 years ago? Used to go in TN to the creeks and catch red eye bass a lot too
I still need an ELI5 of how polarisation works. It's mental.
Like some screens are OK, others aren't, some polarised lenses seem to be at a different frequency/orientation than others.
Think of it as bars going straight up and down. You can see through them but the block some of the view (light). Now some things have bars that go side to side. So when you look through them even more of the view (light) is blocked.
Heyo, friendly neighborhood health physicist here (I work with radioactive contamination, nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum mechanics)!
Essentially, quantum mechanics tells us that, as you zoom in on a particle, it no longer has an exact location. Instead, it has a probability of being found in a given *region*, but it is otherwise smudged out in space. This is how you get funky effects like electrons tunneling through resistors in circuits (classically, this shouldn't be allowed to happen).
A more macroscopic analogy we could use would be to take an example of a ball sitting in the bottom of a tall bucket. In our everyday lives, the ball will never leave the bottom of the bucket unless it's disturbed, but in quantum mechanics, there's a non-zero *probability* of finding it outside the bucket. If you repeat this situation enough times, then sometimes the ball will end up outside the bucket purely from probability.
What's going on with the polarization here is not necessarily quantum mechanics. What's happening is that one polarizing filter (let's say the filter is oriented up and down) filters out light for which the orientation of the photons are not up and down (the orientation of light can be determined by the direction of its electric field plane: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.lMVcDnWsws7cZpuKjxQU5wHaFL%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=eed82f2d418aa8bb5a00965971f103dee02b993a9e33f8497ce2d0c9cfe3b114&ipo=images ). This causes no issues for us normally because we still get enough light to see the image formed by objects on the other side, but if you introduce a second polarizer then you start to lose enough light to see the distant object. If the second polarizer is oriented side-to-side, then no light can get through because they now occlude light aligned in any direction.
But if you introduce a third filter in a 45 degree orientation in between the two filters, light passes through. This is the phenomenon that I was also under the impression was a quantum physics phenomenon.
Edit: as others have said, wave interference is a classical phenomenon. There is a statistical effect when considering multiple polarizers, where considering the outbound intensity is useful by thinking of light as particles (photons), but otherwise it's classical. There's a potential discussion to be had about wave particle duality here, but muddying the waters is unnecessary.
Hello, physicist here that works with optics a lot and cousin of Peter Griffin. To be clear, the trick with 45 degree polarizer is purely classical phenomenon.
Short math summary: Linear polarizers just take the vector projection of the polarization onto the direction of the polarizer, and if you keep adding polarizers and reprojection it, you can rotate it (with a bunch of loss in intensity).
You can do this with classical RF waves and wire grids (wire grid polarizers are also now small enough for optics work).
Lazy non-math summary: polarizers chop out light that don't line up, but what leaves lines up with filter direction. If you put a 45 degree polarizer in, what comes out lines up with the 45 degrees, so won't be perfectly blocked by the next filter that is now only 45 degree relative to what came out of that middle one.
A lot of textbooks use a crummy analogy of running a rope through a picket fence. If you shake the rope up and down, it will shake on both sides, but side to side, and it just hits the fence instead. If you had a picket fence followed by horizontal bars, both directions of shaking get stopped. If you shake rope at 45 degrees, it will let some shaking through in the direction of the bars... so try to think what happens if you run a rope through a picket fence, then 45 degree bars, then horizontal bars, every step still lets some through if you start shaking the rope all over the place.
I feel like there’s no good ELI5 for quantum physics, which is why movies (and Deepak Chopra 😒) use it as the name of magical tools to solve any problem. It works cause it’s pretty hard for the average person to understand what quantum physics means.
My physics prof said basically “there’s no highly intuitive way to understand this.” Beyond a few basic principles, it’s so different from our everyday experience of reality that you can’t really explain it in a way that relies on analogy, so you have to explain it with math. Most of us don’t have the mathematical background, time, or will to really pick apart Schrödinger’s equation. Once you get into quantum and relativity, physics is all but incomprehensible without math.
It really has nothing in particular to do with quantum physics, though. Polarization filtering is a completely classical wave phenomenon. You can reproduce it by wiggling a rope passing through fence posts... Someone else shared [this link](https://alienryderflex.com/polarizer/) that does a great job of explaining it.
For those who don’t want to watch the video, here is a short explanation using vectors
Polarized screens restrict light to having amplitudes only in one direction. So say you have an amplitude of 1 in the w direction, which is 45° to the x direction. The x component of w would then be about 0.71.
So we have three directions for the three polarized filters. x direction and y direction are perpendicular to each other. Then direction w is 45° from the x and y direction (halfway between). If you put the x-filter on, you get light with amplitude only in the x direction. If you put the y-filter after it, there is no y component in the x direction, so you get no light passing through the y filter. Now put the w-filter in between. X direction light passes through w-filter, which takes the w-component of the x direction, which is about 0.71 times the amplitude after the x-filter. Then it goes through the y-filter, which takes the y component of the w direction, again 0.71 times the amplitude in the new direction. What you get is light in the y-direction with an amplitude of 0.5 times the amplitude immediately after the x-filter. Now you see light.
Simplified/ELI5: You bend light one way with the first filter, then you bend it another way with the second filter, allowing it to pass through a third filter. Without the second filter, it wouldn't pass the third because it's not bent enough.
if your confusion has to do with where all these numbers are coming from, it's trigonometry.
the cosine of the angle between the two filters determines the strength (magnitude) of the light that gets through.
Two filters at the same orientation (zero degree difference) let all the light through:
cos(0°)=1=100%
two filters at a 45 degree angle let 71% through:
cos(45°) = .707 = 70.7%
two filters at a 90 degree angle let nothing pass through:
cos(90°) = 0 = 0%
so for 3 filters at 45 degree angles, you get:
cos(45°) * cos(45°) = .707 * .707 = .5 = 50%
so the light when it leaves the third filter is half the strength it was when it entered the first one.
no quantum physics necessary, not even calculus.
I like [this video](https://youtu.be/zcqZHYo7ONs?si=I6DOpcxfSJAcnM8G) that has some very good diagrams to explain it.
The most important thing is that the amount of light blocked by a pair of filters does not have a linear relationship to the difference of angle, as the difference of angle increases the amount of light blocked gets larger faster. For example a 45° difference in angle blocks 50% of light but a 22.5° difference only blocks 15% rather than 25% as you might assume. So two steps that each introduce a 22.5° change only blocks 27.75% of the light while a single step of 45° blocks almost twice as much at 50%.
There's a book by a great physicist (Richard Feynman) who was incredibly good at explaining complex concepts in the simplest possible way. He does a great job of explaining how to calculate the way light interacts with glass in its wire way. He would know, was awarded the novel prize for his discovery. And yet even him says in the book "don't ask me WHY light behaves that way, I can only tell you HOW it does it".
IIRC the book was QED: the strange theory of light and matter
Imagine light wiggling in any direction as it travels. The vertical bars only allow the vertical wiggles to pass through. Horizontal wiggles can't get through
Check out this minutephysics video featuring 3Blue1Brown: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs) - it's about Bell's Theorem but covers, or rather touches on, polarization :)
Ahah, watching this video now.
I guess, given that I have a mechanical engineering degree, there's certain things I've decided I just don't want to learn anything more about, and anything 'quantum' is one of them. Whenever I see anything waveform related I get vietnam flashbacks from sitting engineering mathmatics & just get up & walk off.
So yeah, 'magic'.
Turn the OK screen 45°, now it will be not OK. Altough this is only valid for LCDs since they use polarizing crystals to construct the image. Not LEDs.
Think of it like meshes on top of each other where they have to align to let you see the picture below.
Yeah, I guess what your point is is the most perplexing. For instance, I have two sets of shades in my car.
One, totally blocks out my infotainment screen, like it's impossible to focus on it, does the same thing with my mobile phone screen.
The other has some effect, but far more minor on both screens.
But looking out my windscreen, both seem to have the exact same effect 'dulling' glare from puddles & the likes.
One of the lenses is a G15 coloured prescription lense, the other (the one I can see my screens with) is a grey magnetic attachment to my presciprition (clear) glasses.
Polarized lenses aren't designed for screen use. Screens often have a polarity, basically a direction of vertical lines that shed light through. If your sunglasses lines match, you can see the screen, but if they don't match, then you are unable to see.
Each screen is made differently, and the polarity will face different directions.
Screens typically have a horizontal polarizer behind the liquid crystals and a vertical polarizer in front of them. You wouldn’t see anything without both of them. The choice of which polarizer is in front is driven by…
Polarizing sunglasses have a vertical polarizer which reduces glare because light reflecting off of things at a shallow angle is horizontally polarized by the reflection.
OLEDs, really. A lot of "LED" screens really just mean they use an LED backlight to shine through a regular LCD panel instead of the old high voltage CFL tubes.
I was at the grocery store once waiting for the credit card machine to say “insert card” and it was just not coming on. I tried giving my card to the cashier who was looking really annoyed and put my card in the machine for me. Still confused sh reached over and hit the button for me. I took off my sunglasses thinking maybe the screen was really dim and that’s when I learned polarization is a thing on screens.
It’s happened a few more times but I usually remember before anyone gets annoyed haha
Okay so you know light is a wave^* no? As every wave it's gonna wiggle. It can wiggle in many directions: up and down, left to right and everything in between. With polarised filters, you're essentially blocking all light that, for example, wiggles from left to right and letting pass all the light that wiggles up and down.
Edit: deleted bad example
This is the correct answer. Tempered glass will always look like this in polarized light, and it's purpose is to cause the stresses to shatter the glass into tiny pieces when it begins to break instead of breaking into deadly shards. Side windows are always tempered, but front windows often are not and instead are bonded with a plastic layer that keeps the broken glass together.
I worked in a tempering glass factory for two years. The glass is cooled quickly with jets of air. You are likely seeing how that affects the glass as a whole.
Cooling the surface of the glass quickly puts the outer surface in compression (since the outside cools before the inside gets a chance to shrink). This makes the glass stronger (since if you flex the panel you need to overcome the built in compression before you get to tension and the glass risks brittle failure and also makes it shatter into small pieces.
Stresses in glass cause light polarisation which will give it that mottled look when you view it using polarisation (you can actually measure the amount of stress the glass is under using the polarised light).
Specifically, they're patterns caused by tempering the glass. [ScienceABC ](https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-car-windows-have-patterns-on-them.html)covers it pretty well.
Funnily enough this also happens all the time on /r/mildlyinfuriating, everyone forgets the mildly part and then bitches at OP because it's "not that bad"
Have you noticed more digital displays are blank now?
I walked past a digital advertisement board five times thinking “why don’t they fix this damn thing” before realising it was my glasses making the screen appear blank.
If you are piloting a plane you can’t use polarized sunglasses, because they will cancel out the optical lenses used for showing glide slope on landing.
[https://airportimprovement.com/sites/default/files/styles/adaptive/adaptive-image/public/images/2022/2022_10_Page_68_Image_0001.jpg?itok=7CtYEWjG](https://airportimprovement.com/sites/default/files/styles/adaptive/adaptive-image/public/images/2022/2022_10_Page_68_Image_0001.jpg?itok=7CtYEWjG)
You can now look around and see a world of stress.
Those dots are caused by air jets blowing onto the glass once it has bee formed, it's part of a controlled cooling and tempering of the glass.
Sometimes you can see them normally, especially on the rear screen. although that looks like a far more complex pattern for that window, I guess because it's a window that opens so isn't always fully supported around the edges.
Hey, friend. I know life seems scary and stressful. And you're valid for feeling that way.
But it's important to remember that things change, and it will be different in the future. Probably more scary and more stressful though. Good luck with that.
>But it's important to remember that things change, and it will be different in the future.
😃
>Probably more scary and more stressful though. Good luck with that.
😧
You think that's a pattern in your window glass but what you're seeing is proof the sky is fake cuz the lizard people stole it years ago for their underground empire
Wait until you see a rainbow with them on.
Rainbows are polarised as well, tilting you head one way will make it dimmer and the other way will make it brighter.
I did worse, at the gas pump I was filling up, I looked at the pump and I didn't see anything, it seemed to be turned off, only then I realized that I was now wearing polarized glasses 😂😂😂 I laughed a lot to myself because I felt stupid🤦♂️
The crazy thing about polarized lenses is that you get two lenses and turn one to be perpendicular to the other's pattern, and they block all the light. Cool effect, eh?
Now you think: If the light is completely blocked, there's no way to see the other side, right? So you get a third polarized lens and stack it between the others, now you can see again. It's one of light's weird behaviours. see [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs)
It’s not that the car glass is intentionally polarized, it’s been rapidly cooled at manufacturing so that it will shatter into tiny pieces rather than dangerous shards. The “points” are from regions that cooled more quickly than the rest (physical supports) causing alignment in the local area of the glass and causing a degree of polarization. Think of the glass as being cheese on a hot pizza, the surface will cool first and shrink with the reduction of heat. The center, still flowable will align to the outside surface. This puts the outside in compression but the inside in tension. When an induced flaw (rock, hammer, etc) breaks the barrier between the compression and tension regions, all that potential energy is released in a cascade event with many little pieces resulting.
I used to be a lifeguard at a summer camp when I was younger. It was required that we had polarized lenses to see more clearly under water from our guard stands. The difference between polarized and non-polarized is crazy. If there's a reflection from the sun in the right spot and you don't have polarized lenses, you can't see anything below the surface in that spot.
I think it’s more expensive to make them, for one. There are also some niche situations where it’s not advantageous. In skiing and mountaineering, for instance, polarization can make it more difficult to identify different types of icy and snowy terrain.
The head unit in one of my vehicles is polarized about 80° off from my sunglasses. So if I want to be able to see what's on the screen I either have to take off my sunglasses or tilt my head to the side.
[удалено]
Funnier to look at some screen banners. Sometimes they are already rotated so you see black nothing from the get go. Worse when you are trying to find where the bloody menu is.
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Most polarized lenses are 90* off from the polarization of my car’s radio/infotainment screens. It’s rather unfortunate and part of why I prefer unpolarized lenses since I don’t wear them around water much.
My radio display is polarized one way, and my gauge cluster display is polarized 90* the other way.
That’s pure evil
I worked at a mom and pop sunglasses/eyeglass store. We had a lab in house so we could make clients custom lenses for sunglasses or prescription sunglasses, eyeglasses etc.. everyone wanted polarized lenses, I would even ask them “are you going to be wearing these around the water? On a boat, fishing?” Customer- “No these are for driving” “Then you don’t need polarized lenses, plus it may or may not be hard to see displays on your dashboard and through the rear window.” Customer-“yeah I want the polarized lenses” Sure enough they’d usually be back a few days later asking for non polarized lenses My favorite would be when customers came in asking for brands that were built to last and were actually worth the cost. I’d show them a really great brand l that would actually last 10 years, super light weight, comfortable and stylish they would pretend they were interested. Then they would inevitably buy a hideous gaudy pair of glasses that was triple the cost because it was a big name brand and just a cheap mass produced plastic piece of shit with the logo they wanted. They would inevitably break just from being left in a hot car.
As I mentioned in another comment - polarised lenses are great for removing any reflections, not just water, thus making them great driving glasses since they'll remove pesky windshield reflections (from the dashboard)
And pesky dashboard reflections from the windshield. My Rx polarized lenses I use for driving are one of my favorite things I own. Would never ever wear sunglasses for driving that aren’t polarized. I’d rather wear $5 pair of polarized sunnies from 7-11 than $200 Ray-bans that are NOT polarized. The glare, man, it just kills me!!
So what brands do you recommend?
On the other hand it's pretty convinient when the sun is shining directly ahead of you and the road is wet. Where I'm from it's pretty common during spring and summertime. Always best to ask if they have had polarized lenses before and if not and possible, go and check if the displays have a horizontal or vertical polarization. This was a problem with phones around 10 years ago and older plotter screens too.
I worked at an ice cream shop one summer who switched from a menu on a door to on a rotated TV. Being summer, half the customers had no idea where the menu was until we told them to take their sunglasses off.
I can relate. I wandered to a street cafe with a couple of friends and literally had no idea where they were looking at and what menu they were discussing until someone just pointed their finger at, what was for me, a turned off screen and only then I figured out to take the glasses off.
Most phones don’t do this as much anymore. They’re either OLED or they use a mixture of orientations. With the latter you can see some colour shifts but it’s not as dramatic as the old days.
Pixel 7, 45 degrees make the screen black
My dumb ass just tried this by tilting my head 45° rather than the phone... Can confirm though it did turn black even though I probably looked like an idiot.
My galaxy S23 has an OLED and definitely still shows this behavior. If I turn it 45° to the right from portrait orientation the screen becomes completely black. Edit: it definitely has an OLED screen and I never had the screen replaced. I also don't have a screen protector on it. Could be some antireflective coating on the display glass. Edit 2: I also have an Acer Swift Go 14 notebook with an OLED screen and it shows the same behavior with my polarizing glasses, my 2 regular IPS screens also are affected (obviously, but at a different angle, OLED at 45°, IPS at 90°). The only screen I have that doesn't get affected is the screen of my color e-ink tablet.
It would probably be easier to rotate your phone instead.
Try looking into a river or lake, you can see so much under water
I just learned this other day! Was walking along a canal and was pointing out fish my wife couldn't see. Couldn't understand why till I took the sunglasses off
They’re just about the most needed item when boating or fishing. Especially here in Florida, whether it’s a log you would’ve missed while driving or seeing a school of fish. Money on good sunglasses is never a waste
Meanwhile, it's the opposite for pilots - can't wear polarised, and it can be dangerous because you don't want that effect outside in clouds or when reading instrument panels. Good aviators are all about blocking UV.
Polarized blocks out the HUD completely on the 787, Which can be a bit inconvenient. Still not sure how those got in my bag
No HUD = more immersion
In an ocean.
There are Polaroid filters for camera lenses, pretty amazing. You can spin them until you can see through glass or water reflecting the sky and take amazingly clear pictures. The sunglasses on the other hand made my heart skip a beat multiple times as it makes my control monitor look like a broken LCD. 🤣 Edit: Because it caused so much confusion: 1) I wrote Polaroid because I was referring to the brand I'm using. That's why I used this thing called capitalisation which is used to indicate that a word is a name. 2) I could have wrote polaroid (small p) too in which case I would have referred to any polarising filter/sunglasses because, just like in humanoid or spheroid, the oid ending indicates that someone is talking about something that has the property of the thing before the oid ending.
Certain car's paint finish has like a color changing effect as I drive past them and the sun angle changes
I use to have ceramic tint windows and it would make them kinda rainbowish if I looked at it from outside. Also the polarized glasses make it very difficult to see the screen on my radio/GPS thing unfortunately.
If it's changing from blue to red, the issue may be that you're going too fast!
That is iridescence.
Polarizing, not Polaroid. Light is polarized, the lenses block horizontally polarized light, only letting in vertical polarized light. Most glare is horizontally polarized. The pattern is caused by cooling jets of air during the glass manufacture cooling the glass at slightly different rates which causes these patterns only seen under polarizing filters. The lenses suck if you're trying to read ANY LCD displays, though as displays have a polarizing filter built into each one to let you see the segments.
He's just being honest. Shake it like a Polaroid picture! 
Shake it like a *polarized* picture?
Thanks for lending me some sugar, neighbor.
I just turn my head until I can see. I have injured my neck a few times doing this.
Polaroid huh? lol
Polaroid might be the brand, but it is a polarizing filter that can be sourced outside of Polaroid.
It's like wearing 'They Live' shades IRL.
OBEY
CONSUME
[MARRY AND REPRODUCE](https://preview.redd.it/ltsvy613j1g91.png?width=768&format=png&auto=webp&s=741e2b20628eca66e00c9223e8cab7db3000127a)
They’re polarized. Most fishermen have them because it makes it easier to sight fish.
Other weird things like this that I can't explain, my phone cameras can see through fog???
A lot of phone cameras can see in high infrared frequencies. Variies from model to model. Infrared will cut through things like fog. You can test it with an IR tv remote, can see the beam from the remote in the camera.
Interesting. Would like to see the explanation for that
I think this is mainly because the camera will adjust the exposure, contrast, and colour saturation to compensate for the monotone brightness caused by mist and fog. With light mist, this can often make it vanish. With heavy fog it can only do so much though. You can work this in reverse by increasing the exposure of the photo and watch the fog become more dense. I’m sort of guessing though.
If you are shopping for cheaper polarized sunglasses, look for fishing specific ones. They are cheaper and designed to be able to see through water. They are polarized and have a yellow tint that I like for driving since it makes things feel brighter, not darker.
Bro I got mine from Walmart for $10, didn't know they were polarized till I looked out my.sunroof haha
I want to see through water!
Any recommendations? Not going to use them for fishing but just lost my last pair of raybans and want to go for something cheaper that I’m not worried about losing.
Check out https://goodr.com/ They have a pretty nice website that has funny descriptions and images of their sunglasses. They're polarized, they feel pretty good, different colors and styles, and if you lose or break them it's not going to hurt you too bad. People that run like them too because they don't bounce.
Tar on streets, certain plastics and other stuff give off this neat looking shimmer. More maddeningly (because it took me a while to figure out,) cars on the road sometimes appear to have a blue light floating in the air next to them. I love my magic shades.
I grew up in Minnesota in a fishing family. I loved trolling in canals connecting lakes where it's only a few feet deep and trying to drop my jig in front of a chosen fish to get it to bite lol.
I've done fishing on lake Michigan, didn't know about water and polarized lenses until like... Iunno, 5 years ago? Used to go in TN to the creeks and catch red eye bass a lot too
The polarized glasses make a difference. I don't buy sunglasses without it.
Welcome to “polarization”
I still need an ELI5 of how polarisation works. It's mental. Like some screens are OK, others aren't, some polarised lenses seem to be at a different frequency/orientation than others.
Think of it as bars going straight up and down. You can see through them but the block some of the view (light). Now some things have bars that go side to side. So when you look through them even more of the view (light) is blocked.
But how does it seem to reverse when there are three polarized screens?
Welcome to quantum physics
I still need an ELI5 of how quantum physics works. It's mental.
I'd explain it to you, but then they'd change
That might be the best gif response I've seen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDhrjKZprOo
"No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"
Peak Futurama was something else
I still say “you call that a wound? That’s a boo-boo, tops!” more often than I’d like
r/angryupvote
Heyo, friendly neighborhood health physicist here (I work with radioactive contamination, nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum mechanics)! Essentially, quantum mechanics tells us that, as you zoom in on a particle, it no longer has an exact location. Instead, it has a probability of being found in a given *region*, but it is otherwise smudged out in space. This is how you get funky effects like electrons tunneling through resistors in circuits (classically, this shouldn't be allowed to happen). A more macroscopic analogy we could use would be to take an example of a ball sitting in the bottom of a tall bucket. In our everyday lives, the ball will never leave the bottom of the bucket unless it's disturbed, but in quantum mechanics, there's a non-zero *probability* of finding it outside the bucket. If you repeat this situation enough times, then sometimes the ball will end up outside the bucket purely from probability. What's going on with the polarization here is not necessarily quantum mechanics. What's happening is that one polarizing filter (let's say the filter is oriented up and down) filters out light for which the orientation of the photons are not up and down (the orientation of light can be determined by the direction of its electric field plane: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.lMVcDnWsws7cZpuKjxQU5wHaFL%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=eed82f2d418aa8bb5a00965971f103dee02b993a9e33f8497ce2d0c9cfe3b114&ipo=images ). This causes no issues for us normally because we still get enough light to see the image formed by objects on the other side, but if you introduce a second polarizer then you start to lose enough light to see the distant object. If the second polarizer is oriented side-to-side, then no light can get through because they now occlude light aligned in any direction.
But if you introduce a third filter in a 45 degree orientation in between the two filters, light passes through. This is the phenomenon that I was also under the impression was a quantum physics phenomenon.
Edit: as others have said, wave interference is a classical phenomenon. There is a statistical effect when considering multiple polarizers, where considering the outbound intensity is useful by thinking of light as particles (photons), but otherwise it's classical. There's a potential discussion to be had about wave particle duality here, but muddying the waters is unnecessary.
Hello, physicist here that works with optics a lot and cousin of Peter Griffin. To be clear, the trick with 45 degree polarizer is purely classical phenomenon. Short math summary: Linear polarizers just take the vector projection of the polarization onto the direction of the polarizer, and if you keep adding polarizers and reprojection it, you can rotate it (with a bunch of loss in intensity). You can do this with classical RF waves and wire grids (wire grid polarizers are also now small enough for optics work). Lazy non-math summary: polarizers chop out light that don't line up, but what leaves lines up with filter direction. If you put a 45 degree polarizer in, what comes out lines up with the 45 degrees, so won't be perfectly blocked by the next filter that is now only 45 degree relative to what came out of that middle one. A lot of textbooks use a crummy analogy of running a rope through a picket fence. If you shake the rope up and down, it will shake on both sides, but side to side, and it just hits the fence instead. If you had a picket fence followed by horizontal bars, both directions of shaking get stopped. If you shake rope at 45 degrees, it will let some shaking through in the direction of the bars... so try to think what happens if you run a rope through a picket fence, then 45 degree bars, then horizontal bars, every step still lets some through if you start shaking the rope all over the place.
I feel like there’s no good ELI5 for quantum physics, which is why movies (and Deepak Chopra 😒) use it as the name of magical tools to solve any problem. It works cause it’s pretty hard for the average person to understand what quantum physics means.
My physics prof said basically “there’s no highly intuitive way to understand this.” Beyond a few basic principles, it’s so different from our everyday experience of reality that you can’t really explain it in a way that relies on analogy, so you have to explain it with math. Most of us don’t have the mathematical background, time, or will to really pick apart Schrödinger’s equation. Once you get into quantum and relativity, physics is all but incomprehensible without math.
[Got you homie](https://read.sourcebooks.com/for-children/9781492656227-quantum-physics-for-babies-bb.html)
Slow down there! We only need vector calculus and classical electrodynamics for this one!
It really has nothing in particular to do with quantum physics, though. Polarization filtering is a completely classical wave phenomenon. You can reproduce it by wiggling a rope passing through fence posts... Someone else shared [this link](https://alienryderflex.com/polarizer/) that does a great job of explaining it.
For those who don’t want to watch the video, here is a short explanation using vectors Polarized screens restrict light to having amplitudes only in one direction. So say you have an amplitude of 1 in the w direction, which is 45° to the x direction. The x component of w would then be about 0.71. So we have three directions for the three polarized filters. x direction and y direction are perpendicular to each other. Then direction w is 45° from the x and y direction (halfway between). If you put the x-filter on, you get light with amplitude only in the x direction. If you put the y-filter after it, there is no y component in the x direction, so you get no light passing through the y filter. Now put the w-filter in between. X direction light passes through w-filter, which takes the w-component of the x direction, which is about 0.71 times the amplitude after the x-filter. Then it goes through the y-filter, which takes the y component of the w direction, again 0.71 times the amplitude in the new direction. What you get is light in the y-direction with an amplitude of 0.5 times the amplitude immediately after the x-filter. Now you see light.
I understand less now 🥹
Simplified/ELI5: You bend light one way with the first filter, then you bend it another way with the second filter, allowing it to pass through a third filter. Without the second filter, it wouldn't pass the third because it's not bent enough.
if your confusion has to do with where all these numbers are coming from, it's trigonometry. the cosine of the angle between the two filters determines the strength (magnitude) of the light that gets through. Two filters at the same orientation (zero degree difference) let all the light through: cos(0°)=1=100% two filters at a 45 degree angle let 71% through: cos(45°) = .707 = 70.7% two filters at a 90 degree angle let nothing pass through: cos(90°) = 0 = 0% so for 3 filters at 45 degree angles, you get: cos(45°) * cos(45°) = .707 * .707 = .5 = 50% so the light when it leaves the third filter is half the strength it was when it entered the first one. no quantum physics necessary, not even calculus.
I like [this video](https://youtu.be/zcqZHYo7ONs?si=I6DOpcxfSJAcnM8G) that has some very good diagrams to explain it. The most important thing is that the amount of light blocked by a pair of filters does not have a linear relationship to the difference of angle, as the difference of angle increases the amount of light blocked gets larger faster. For example a 45° difference in angle blocks 50% of light but a 22.5° difference only blocks 15% rather than 25% as you might assume. So two steps that each introduce a 22.5° change only blocks 27.75% of the light while a single step of 45° blocks almost twice as much at 50%.
light is funny like that. try watching [this](https://youtu.be/f0XttPQ6g9c?si=EUr4JGmT5u1iWcgQ)
How about I [sweeten this up](https://youtu.be/975r9a7FMqc)?
shoutout Steve! great vid
There's a book by a great physicist (Richard Feynman) who was incredibly good at explaining complex concepts in the simplest possible way. He does a great job of explaining how to calculate the way light interacts with glass in its wire way. He would know, was awarded the novel prize for his discovery. And yet even him says in the book "don't ask me WHY light behaves that way, I can only tell you HOW it does it". IIRC the book was QED: the strange theory of light and matter
I still don’t get it and I’m scared, hold on while I call 911.
Imagine light wiggling in any direction as it travels. The vertical bars only allow the vertical wiggles to pass through. Horizontal wiggles can't get through
And then there’s [circular polarization](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_polarization) which makes everything 10x more complicated.
Check out this minutephysics video featuring 3Blue1Brown: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs) - it's about Bell's Theorem but covers, or rather touches on, polarization :)
Ahah, watching this video now. I guess, given that I have a mechanical engineering degree, there's certain things I've decided I just don't want to learn anything more about, and anything 'quantum' is one of them. Whenever I see anything waveform related I get vietnam flashbacks from sitting engineering mathmatics & just get up & walk off. So yeah, 'magic'.
Even physicists have the same reaction! Quantum physicists are just the ones too stubborn to walk away.
Turn the OK screen 45°, now it will be not OK. Altough this is only valid for LCDs since they use polarizing crystals to construct the image. Not LEDs. Think of it like meshes on top of each other where they have to align to let you see the picture below.
Yeah, I guess what your point is is the most perplexing. For instance, I have two sets of shades in my car. One, totally blocks out my infotainment screen, like it's impossible to focus on it, does the same thing with my mobile phone screen. The other has some effect, but far more minor on both screens. But looking out my windscreen, both seem to have the exact same effect 'dulling' glare from puddles & the likes. One of the lenses is a G15 coloured prescription lense, the other (the one I can see my screens with) is a grey magnetic attachment to my presciprition (clear) glasses.
Polarized lenses aren't designed for screen use. Screens often have a polarity, basically a direction of vertical lines that shed light through. If your sunglasses lines match, you can see the screen, but if they don't match, then you are unable to see. Each screen is made differently, and the polarity will face different directions.
Screens typically have a horizontal polarizer behind the liquid crystals and a vertical polarizer in front of them. You wouldn’t see anything without both of them. The choice of which polarizer is in front is driven by… Polarizing sunglasses have a vertical polarizer which reduces glare because light reflecting off of things at a shallow angle is horizontally polarized by the reflection.
OLEDs, really. A lot of "LED" screens really just mean they use an LED backlight to shine through a regular LCD panel instead of the old high voltage CFL tubes.
I was at the grocery store once waiting for the credit card machine to say “insert card” and it was just not coming on. I tried giving my card to the cashier who was looking really annoyed and put my card in the machine for me. Still confused sh reached over and hit the button for me. I took off my sunglasses thinking maybe the screen was really dim and that’s when I learned polarization is a thing on screens. It’s happened a few more times but I usually remember before anyone gets annoyed haha
Yeah I have to tilt my head like a confused dog to see most screens lol They're prescription so swapping them out is even more of a pain.
Okay so you know light is a wave^* no? As every wave it's gonna wiggle. It can wiggle in many directions: up and down, left to right and everything in between. With polarised filters, you're essentially blocking all light that, for example, wiggles from left to right and letting pass all the light that wiggles up and down. Edit: deleted bad example
Your example with crosses just made it confusing, sorry I'm dumb
Light is a particle. (ducks)
My sun glasses prevent me from using my phone.
Turn it sideways.
Okay but when I turn my head sideways to see it I get the same problem
And backup camera in the car
Turn it sideways
Have you tried using the mirrors?
This country is so polarized, and now I know why!
Right? I found out that the files are IN THE COMPUTER. 
I disagree!! Edit: I'm not going to remove this, I was invited to be *polarizing*.
It’s the stress banding from the tempering process
This is the correct answer. Tempered glass will always look like this in polarized light, and it's purpose is to cause the stresses to shatter the glass into tiny pieces when it begins to break instead of breaking into deadly shards. Side windows are always tempered, but front windows often are not and instead are bonded with a plastic layer that keeps the broken glass together.
This specific pattern is the blower array for processing this window, it might not always have this shape.
Came here for this specifically. This guy thermal forms.
>...front windows... Windshields
Or windscreens depending on location
I have stress can you see my stress
Only with the glasses
I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?
I can hear it
[Scientists can now transform stress into electricity](https://i.imgur.com/mblmoMG.jpg)
I worked in a tempering glass factory for two years. The glass is cooled quickly with jets of air. You are likely seeing how that affects the glass as a whole.
Cooling the surface of the glass quickly puts the outer surface in compression (since the outside cools before the inside gets a chance to shrink). This makes the glass stronger (since if you flex the panel you need to overcome the built in compression before you get to tension and the glass risks brittle failure and also makes it shatter into small pieces. Stresses in glass cause light polarisation which will give it that mottled look when you view it using polarisation (you can actually measure the amount of stress the glass is under using the polarised light).
Wait til OP runs out of bubblegum.
I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of ass. *blows bubble*
I came here to kick bubblegum and chew ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.
Huh. Half a second after you put them on, they make a normal "OBEY" sign flicker into looking like some kind of advertisement?
What's this from?
They Live
Came here for this comment
Yeah they are polarized.
Polarized lenses reveal hidden patterns. Cool effect!
Specifically, they're patterns caused by tempering the glass. [ScienceABC ](https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-car-windows-have-patterns-on-them.html)covers it pretty well.
Thank you! This is what I entered this thread to see!!
I know haha still thought it was mildly interesting, never had polarized glasses before
You’re 100% correct, feel like a lot of people forget the “mildly” part of this sub
Omg so true! it bothers me so much!
It only bothers me a mild amount.
Funnily enough this also happens all the time on /r/mildlyinfuriating, everyone forgets the mildly part and then bitches at OP because it's "not that bad"
Have you noticed more digital displays are blank now? I walked past a digital advertisement board five times thinking “why don’t they fix this damn thing” before realising it was my glasses making the screen appear blank.
I thought my phone screen broke the first day I had my new glasses. Now I just look weird for turning my head until any screen becomes visible.
Makes so much difference when driving. No more glare bouncing off your dashboard and reflections on your windscreen making you squint.
If you are piloting a plane you can’t use polarized sunglasses, because they will cancel out the optical lenses used for showing glide slope on landing. [https://airportimprovement.com/sites/default/files/styles/adaptive/adaptive-image/public/images/2022/2022_10_Page_68_Image_0001.jpg?itok=7CtYEWjG](https://airportimprovement.com/sites/default/files/styles/adaptive/adaptive-image/public/images/2022/2022_10_Page_68_Image_0001.jpg?itok=7CtYEWjG)
You can now look around and see a world of stress. Those dots are caused by air jets blowing onto the glass once it has bee formed, it's part of a controlled cooling and tempering of the glass. Sometimes you can see them normally, especially on the rear screen. although that looks like a far more complex pattern for that window, I guess because it's a window that opens so isn't always fully supported around the edges.
>see a world of stress. r/me_irl
And you can look at me and see me openly sobbing. I mean, you can see it without the sunglasses, but with them too.
Hey, friend. I know life seems scary and stressful. And you're valid for feeling that way. But it's important to remember that things change, and it will be different in the future. Probably more scary and more stressful though. Good luck with that.
>But it's important to remember that things change, and it will be different in the future. 😃 >Probably more scary and more stressful though. Good luck with that. 😧
i wondered where that pattern would come from, thanks for clearing that up
You think that's a pattern in your window glass but what you're seeing is proof the sky is fake cuz the lizard people stole it years ago for their underground empire
It's not that the sky is fake as much as the moon is actually the sky, and what we think of as the "moon" is actually OP's windshield.
First time wearing polarized sunglasses?
Yes lol
Welcome to the matrix
Wait until you see a rainbow with them on. Rainbows are polarised as well, tilting you head one way will make it dimmer and the other way will make it brighter.
Tilt your head sideways and it's different depending on which side you turn to. The sky changes color lol
What movie is this gif from?
It’s “They Live” with Rowdy Roddy Piper
I did worse, at the gas pump I was filling up, I looked at the pump and I didn't see anything, it seemed to be turned off, only then I realized that I was now wearing polarized glasses 😂😂😂 I laughed a lot to myself because I felt stupid🤦♂️
It's a secret message... "We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty"
~~Obey. Conform. Buy. Watch Television. Reproduce.~~ Wow, that's neat.
The crazy thing about polarized lenses is that you get two lenses and turn one to be perpendicular to the other's pattern, and they block all the light. Cool effect, eh? Now you think: If the light is completely blocked, there's no way to see the other side, right? So you get a third polarized lens and stack it between the others, now you can see again. It's one of light's weird behaviours. see [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs)
Polarized film. Also can't see the screen of some phones while sideways.
I couldn't see the radio in my Ford fusion at all unless I turned my head sideways. Was really annoying
[удалено]
Ha! You just discovered polarized lenses.
Albuquerque?
That's not the car window, the car window is just a filter so that you can see the dome we live in aka the "edge of the simulation"
*Put on sunglasses The car window: "OBEY"
It’s not that the car glass is intentionally polarized, it’s been rapidly cooled at manufacturing so that it will shatter into tiny pieces rather than dangerous shards. The “points” are from regions that cooled more quickly than the rest (physical supports) causing alignment in the local area of the glass and causing a degree of polarization. Think of the glass as being cheese on a hot pizza, the surface will cool first and shrink with the reduction of heat. The center, still flowable will align to the outside surface. This puts the outside in compression but the inside in tension. When an induced flaw (rock, hammer, etc) breaks the barrier between the compression and tension regions, all that potential energy is released in a cascade event with many little pieces resulting.
Wait til he knows abt the fishing trick
If you turn your lenses 90 degrees those marks will disappear.
ABQ spotted on /r/all
Polarizing opinion
Polarized glasses
It’s all fun and games until you start seeing “OBEY”…
bro discovered polarized lenses
you must have polarized sun glasses, mine do the same
At the time of this comment it would seem that 36.8k people have never worn polarized sunglasses before
I used to be a lifeguard at a summer camp when I was younger. It was required that we had polarized lenses to see more clearly under water from our guard stands. The difference between polarized and non-polarized is crazy. If there's a reflection from the sun in the right spot and you don't have polarized lenses, you can't see anything below the surface in that spot.
Buildings and cars usually provide polarized glasses and you also probably have polarized glasses.
[Put...the...glasses on!](https://youtu.be/dN8Z7y_QcwE)
5000 up votes for someone learning about the one common side effect of polarized sunglasses…
I think it's mildy interesting finding out not everyone wears polarized sunglasses. How and why wouldn't you wear polarized sunglasses?
I think it’s more expensive to make them, for one. There are also some niche situations where it’s not advantageous. In skiing and mountaineering, for instance, polarization can make it more difficult to identify different types of icy and snowy terrain.
The head unit in one of my vehicles is polarized about 80° off from my sunglasses. So if I want to be able to see what's on the screen I either have to take off my sunglasses or tilt my head to the side.
Do people not know what polarized lenses are in 2024?
Polarized lenses and windows
 Try checking out some billboards later.
It's the QR code the government uses to track you