Polarizing out poor magnets

I ve been out of the blog for sometime, because I have not done anything even remotely funny...

Except asking a guy whether I knew him, and why he was sending me a friend request on Orkut, just a month after spending an hour talking to him...Yes, I totally forgot.. I thought the name rang a bell, but that is all I could recall...

Why I suddenly came online to post a blog?
Not to bemoan my diminishing memory powers, but because something else rang a bell...

I was studying (Ahem.. yes, I do study at certain critical times, such as the week before exams) polarization.

I was reminded of my lab partner in MSc. She was asked, "What is Polarization?", to which she answered, " Polarized waves are those which have no magnetic fields."

HUH!! An electromagnetic wave loses its magnetic field when it is polarized, and manages to be a electromagnetic wave after that???

All her knowledge of physics came from the books she read... and she read inhuman numbers of them... Thinking, logic and analysis almost never entered the picture, just memory...

All books begin with talking about light being an electromagnetic wave, and when they start about polarization, they begin to talk about components of electric field, and what direction the electric field should be in, for various kinds of polarization.

This woman, dint see mentions of magnetic fields, so she thought, no magnetic field in the polarized waves!!!!

In case any of you are thinking that she is right, please realize that we can talk about components of magnetic field in polarized waves and mean exactly the same thing, without banishing the poor electric field into non-existence...

I know, most of my readers are utterly unsympathetic towards physics...

I have a post coming up for you ppl soon!!!

So, hang in there!!