Karen Kay Ogden, age 12, of Richfield, Utah, for her question:

What is polarized light?

The Bible story of creation begins with "Let there be light." We now know that light made all following miracles of life possible. We call it a natural phenomenon, which means that it obviously is but nobody knows just what it is. However, this does not stop scientists from studying how various aspects of light behave and inventing things to do with it. One of these fields is polarized light, which gave us non glare sunglasses, fabulous laser beams and dozens of useful everyday items.

An invisible beam of ordinary light is a frantic mish mash of multiple vibrations and super speed energies. Polarizing separates the mish mash into opposite types of vibrations. Its beams react with ordinary light and with other polarized beams. Various polarized materials can be used to reduce the sun's glare and enhance the scenery, to sharpen high speed photography and boost microscopes. The fabulous laser is highly intensified polarized light.

Let's start with an ordinary light beam. Imagine a speeding arrow with swarms of tiny joggers vibrating to and fro across its path on all sides in all directions including circles and ellipses. Multiply the joggers by a zillion, reduce the scale to invisibility and increase the activity to 186,000 miles per second. Obviously this mish mash is too complex for the mind to grasp. Scientists cope with parts of it by using a few basic ideas. They work on the theories that the electromagnetic energy of light is in mini bundles called photons and its multiple transverse waves vibrate across its path.

To polarize the wish mash they separate waves that vibrate in one direction. For example, the verticals and horizontals vibrate in opposite directions. They are separated when ordinary light goes through a prism called a beam splitter. It sorts the vibrations and emerges as two beams of polarized light. They interact with ordinary light to reduce the blur of either its horizontal or vertical vibrations.

For ordinary purposes only one beam is needed. This can be separated with a sort of cage door grid. But parallel bars must be slim enough and close enough to let the verticals pass through and block the side swinging horizontals. Commercial polaroid material does the job with long, slim molecules called polymers. They are aligned parallel lines and the grid pattern sealed inside transparent plastic.

When the mish mash goes through, its vertical vibrations pass between the bars and the side swinging horizontals cannot. When this polarized material is sandwiched inside sunglasses, it reduces the glare that reflects upward from flat surfaces.

Various vibrations can be separated to polarize beams for different purposes. Polarized materials are used to boost cameras, to create fantastic new kinds of photography and to vivify microscope lenses. And a very special lamp intensifies polarized light to create astounding laser beams.