Recent content by PathEnthusiast

YES!!! It hadn't occurred to me that they would coat just one side with birefringent material. I now have some additional observations: 1) Light from the computer monitor is not blocked by the analyzer when the "top" of the analyzer faces the computer screen. 2) Light from the overhead...

Hey all! I'm a pathologist and just got a polarizer/analyzer pair for my microscope. I decided to play around with them a little before I put them into the microscope to demonstrate the way they block light, and initially I found that no light was blocked no matter how I rotated them relative to...

That one works! I'm definitely getting closer. I think I can formulate my question a little more clearly with the help of that diagram. So the unpolarized light, in my imagining of the rotating crystal scenario, is entering at some "fixed" point around which the crystal is rotated. The ordinary...

That link is giving me a permissions-error, unfortunately, so I can't see it. In general terms, a solution along those lines would make sense, but I'm having trouble visualizing the way shifting the axis would affect the position of the image, so a diagram would certainly be helpful.

Thanks for the reply! What you've said is in line with my understanding of the ordinary/extraordinary terminology and that the two refractive indices of the crystal are polarization-dependent. But I still don't understand the rotational behavior of the images. The way I am conceptualizing...

I have been doing some reading about birefringence in order to understand colors observed in different birefringent crystals when I came across the following page in connection with calcite crystal birefringence. https://www.microscopyu.com/tutorials/birefringence-in-calcite-crystals I think I...

Thank you all so much for your replies! They were quite helpful in clarifying the issue. I have some follow-up questions about the way "acceleration" works in fluids, but I'm going to take some time to think about them and see if there's another thread addressing those issues before I start...

First off, I'm a pathology resident, so it's been a long time since I've done real physics. But I really like physics and I try, whenever possible, to at least develop a basic understanding of the physics underlying physiology. With that as prelude, this question was inspired by blood flow but I...