Talk:Étienne-Louis Malus

Untitled
But that's not what Malus did! He did not "define a measure (orientation angle) by which to characterize relations between a light source and a system of detectors". It was the other way around. He clarified the law relating the intensity of the output from a polariser to that of the input as a function of the difference between the polarisation direction of the input and that of the polariser. The law that now bears his name is:

"The intensity of the beam from a polariser can be obtained by multiplying that of the input by the square of the cosine of θ, where θ is the angle between the polarisation direction of the input and the polarisation axis of the polariser."

I expect there's a neater way of putting this. I'll check and probably edit the page accordingly. Caroline Thompson 09:47, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 08:30, 27 August 2007 (UTC)