4 ms·
What’s up with light having a helical shape and dna as well?
by adamnemecek 8y ago
What’s up with light having a helical shape and dna as well?
- Retra 8y agoLight doesn't have a helical shape, it's just diagrammatically drawn that way to illustrate the orthogonality of fields.
- adamnemecek 8y agoIt kinda does https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_angular_momentum_of_light https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_angular_momentum_of_...
- strainer 8y agoI didnt expect that! Interesting that there are even telecommunication experiments with "circular polarized" light. It still seems most light has no circular polarization though and it can't supercoil like DNA either, unless guided through a coiled fiber or something.
- starbeast 8y agoI think most light has some circular polarisation component. Also, modern 3d films use clockwise and anticlockwise polarised light to project the left and right images.
- Retra 8y agoThat's the shape of a light beam, which can be arranged anyway you like.
- adamnemecek 8y agoIt’s not any way. You are very restricted to either a helix or a disk.
- achillesheels 8y agoA shot in the dark: it’s characteristic of a complex exponential function ergo the trigonometrical nature of waveforms in time. (Euler’s Formula and all that Jazz) I am inclined to think of both as communication signals.
- adamnemecek 8y agoI believe that that is the case, yes. A helix is a quaternion.
- starbeast 8y ago>A helix is a quaternion. Thanks for that observation. You have given me yet another way to look at quaternions. If you take the axis vector and the rotation and consider them combined, yep, is a helix.
- adamnemecek 8y agoYup. They are quite a beast. The next step is dual quaternions which correspond to screws.
- starbeast 8y agoIn that case, I could really do with a dual quaternion.