Today I went to pick up new glasses: regular and sun. The sunglasses are polarized, which I don't think I've worn before. When I put them on in the shop, everything - including my glasses in my reflection - was "shiny," which the optician attributed to the polarization. Otherwise, they seemed fine - until I went outside. Everything felt "black and white," like when you wear a pair of old-fashioned 3-D glasses (red and blue) outside. Again, I chalked it up to polarization, new prescription, etc., until I got in the truck and drove toward the brightly illuminated asphalt of the parking lot. Something was wrong, and I couldn't determine what until I alternately closed one eye. The asphalt was bright white through one lens, but black with texture through the other.
I took them back in and tried to describe to the optician what I saw, without trying to sound deranged. Finally, she looked through them at a polarization test/display image. Here's what we saw:
Without Polarization
Correct Polarization
"Inverse?" Polarization
Once I looked at the display, I had a twinge of "Matrix" paranoia (although I admit I've not seen the movie, so forgive my naive reference) that you can't really trust anything you see. If just a change in some coating on my lens (invisible when looking at the lens) can 1) bring out an image not there, and 2) reverse it subjectively depending upon how the coating is applied, then how can one trust anything we see? (And don't even get me started on manipulated images in popular media.)
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