Talk:Étienne-Louis Malus

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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)

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