Trying to make sure I understand this. According to the article, the "spookiness" comes from a misunderstanding of what a polarizer does. It doesn't "block" al

Trying to make sure I understand this. According to the article, the "spookiness" comes from a misunderstanding of what a polarizer does. It doesn't "block" all light polarized on axes different from the polarizer. We know this is true because otherwise sunglasses would transmit much less light than they do. Imagine sunglasses could block any photon within +/- 1 degree of the polarization plane. That means that just 1/180th of the light would get through. But the observed transmission is much higher. Instead, the polarizer does two things. First, it emits light polarized parallel to its axis. But, and this is the key, all incident light gets effectively passed. Along the way the intensity (amplitude, or "magnitude" in the article) is attenuated based on deviation from the polarizer's plane. The attenuation is 0% for light polarized in parallel and 100% for light polarized perpendicularly. Now we can understand the experiment with a new mental model. Three filters are placed in series (A, B, and C). However, we can disregard A for the most part and treat this as a two-filter system (B, C), where the light exiting B is attenuated relative to the light entering A and polarized along B's axis. This model explains all of the observations.