How wiggling charges give rise to light

Summary by Krater

This video explains the classical physics of electromagnetic radiation and light propagation to understand why sugar water causes diagonal color stripes when linearly polarized light passes through it.

From the video

Answers: Why does sugar water produce colored diagonal stripes when viewed with linearly polarized light?

• electromagnetic radiation
• Coulomb's law
• electric field
• light wave propagation
• polarization of light
• chirality of sucrose molecules
• index of refraction

What it concludes

• Accelerating charges radiate electromagnetic waves whose electric field strength decays proportionally to 1 over r rather than 1 over r squared.
• Light is the radiative component of the electric field produced by accelerating charges, with vector strength perpendicular to the propagation direction.
• Chiral molecules like sucrose introduce an asymmetry that causes left-handed and right-handed circularly polarized light to travel at different speeds, resulting in optical rotation.
• Linear polarization is equivalent to equal parts left-handed and right-handed circular polarization, and differing phase shifts between them cause the plane of polarization to rotate.