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Chapter 1: Problem 25

If you lie on a beach looking at the water with your head tipped slightly sideways, your polarized sunglasses do not work very well. Why not?

Short Answer

Expert verified
Polarized sunglasses work by blocking horizontally-polarized light, which reduces glare off horizontal surfaces like water. When you tilt your head, the orientation of the polarizing film in the lenses changes, causing it to be less effective in blocking horizontally-polarized light. As a result, some glare passes through the lenses, and the sunglasses don't work as well in reducing glare in this position.

Step by step solution

01

Understanding Polarized Sunglasses

Polarized sunglasses function by having a special filter called a polarizing film or layer, which allows only certain light waves to pass through while blocking others. These sunglasses are designed to reduce glare caused by the reflection of light off horizontal surfaces like water, snow, or glass. The polarizing film allows vertically-polarized light to pass through the lenses while blocking horizontally-polarized light. This is important because glare occurs when horizontally-polarized light bounces off the surface and enters your eyes.
02

Effect of Tilting the Head

When we tilt our head while wearing polarized sunglasses, the orientation of the polarizing film in the lenses changes with respect to the incident light. Since the lenses are designed to block horizontally-polarized light, tilting the head changes the angle at which the polarizing film is cutting off light, making it less effective in reducing glare. In other words, when our head is tilted, the polarizing film in the sunglasses is no longer perfectly aligned with the horizontally-polarized light, and some of that light passes through the lenses and enters our eyes. This causes the polarized sunglasses to not work as well and reduces their effectiveness in blocking glare.
03

Conclusion

Polarized sunglasses are designed to reduce glare by blocking horizontally-polarized light. However, when our head is tilted, the orientation of the polarizing film in the lenses changes, making it less effective in reducing glare. This is why polarized sunglasses do not work very well when our head is tipped slightly sideways while lying on a beach and looking at the water.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

Explain why a person's legs appear very short when wading in a pool. Justify your explanation with a ray diagram showing the path of rays from the feet to the eye of an observer who is out of the water.

A narrow beam of light containing red (660 nm) and blue \((470 \mathrm{nm})\) wavelengths travels from air through a \(1.00-\mathrm{cm}\) -thick flat piece of crown glass and back to air again. The beam strikes at a \(30.0^{\circ}\) incident angle. (a) \(\mathrm{At}\) what angles do the two colors emerge? (b) By what distance are the red and blue separated when they emerge?

A light ray falls on the left face of a prism (see below) at the angle of incidence \(\theta\) for which the emerging beam has an angle of refraction \(\theta\) at the right face. Show that the index of refraction \(n\) of the glass prism is given by. $$n=\frac{\sin \frac{1}{2}(\alpha+\phi)}{\sin \frac{1}{2} \phi}$$ where \(\phi\) is the vertex angle of the prism and \(\alpha\) is the angle through which the beam has been deviated. If \(\alpha=37.0^{\circ}\) and the base angles of the prism are each \(50.0^{\circ},\) what is \(n ?\)

What angle would the axis of a polarizing filter need to make with the direction of polarized light of intensity \(1.00 \mathrm{kW} / \mathrm{m}^{2}\) to reduce the intensity to \(10.0 \mathrm{W} / \mathrm{m}^{2} ?\)

Explain what happens to the energy carried by light that it is dimmed by passing it through two crossed polarizing filters.
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