This tests your understanding of light | The barber pole effect

the setup here starts with a cylinder full of sugar water basically and we're about to shine some white light into it but before it gets there it passes through a linearly polarizing filter and what that means basically is that if you look at all of the light waves beyond the point of that filter those waves are only going to be wiggling in One Direction say up and down and don't worry in a few minutes we're going to go into much more detail about what specifically is wiggling and what the significance of that wiggling direction is but skipping to the punch line first the demo also includes a second linearly polarizing filter coming out the other end and I want you to predict what we're going to see once we turn the light on now I suspect some viewers might already have a little bit of a sense for what's going on because a few years ago Steve mold made a really excellent video about this phenomenon of shining polarized light through sugar water it was really well done which is no surprise because everything Steve makes is but even if you watched that this is a rich enough phenomenon that there's still more to be explained in fact even if you made that video this is a rich enough phenomenon that there's more to be explained I'm curious Steve when you made that video did you happen to get a good view of the side of the glass probably when the rest of the lights in the room were off or something like that no no I didn't think about the side view great so given the setup that we're looking at now once we turn off the room lights and turn on the lamp I'm curious if you have a prediction for what you might see well there will be some scattering I suppose but then if we're just looking at the tube we're not applying any kind of uh filter to just looking directly at the tube so I mean my my instinct is nothing nothing will happen that would have been my guess too but let me just show you what it looks like when we turn off the room lights and we turn on the lamp ooh and then if you uh turn the initial polarizer you can kind of see ...