So I agree that it would be cleaner that way; however, I tend to run into problems when teaching Atwood machines (two masses, connected by a string over a pulley).
The force of gravity on each mass is DOWN, but when we do Fnet we have to make one Fg positive and the other negative for it to...
Hi everyone. I'm the only physics teacher at my school, so I have nobody to bounce ideas off of. I'm having a problem with students getting confused with direction when calculating net force.
I teach an introductory physics course. It's the first time the students have ever seen physics and...
Thank you! You were right about the question I was intending to ask haha. It makes sense now after looking up some diagrams of circularly polarized light (which I had never heard of, so thanks for the example!)
Thanks for your help!
I am still confused about the last paragraph you wrote. Once light becomes plane polarized, can it become unpolarized? What I mean is, right after passing through the filter, the light's electric fields vibrate in one plane only. Do they CONTINUE to vibrate only in that...
I see - so because the electric fields can be broken down into orthogonal components, some component of the horizontally polarized light will make it through the angled filter. The component that is parallel to the filter lines makes it through. This explains why the light is dimmer after...
Homework Statement
I'm a new physics teacher and was teaching about polarization of light today. A student asked me a question I wasn't sure of the answer to.
Let's say you have two polarizing filters stacked on top of one another. The first filter is held so that the spaces in the filter are...