Not what you think! Today I wanted to talk briefly about an interesting rabbit hole I went down. I’ve been working on improving my ability to make and produce YouTube content, which I practice daily over on my YouTube channel, Giant Orange Beanbag (named for, you know, my giant orange beanbag). Anyway, in watching one of the videos I made recently I realized that the reflection of the monitor in my eyeglasses was incredibly bad and distracting, so I started googling how to get rid of that. There were the standard suggestions of turning down the monitor, adding lights off to the side, changing the camera angle, etc., but one of the things I didn’t know about was anti-reflective coating on glasses. So long story short I ended up ordering a pair, but along the way I read some fascinating science articles about how the whole thing worked. I thought maybe it would have to do with scattering the light to break up the patterns, but actually it’s cooler than that. Through a combination of a material with a very specific index of refraction and a very small layer of coating which is actually one-quarter of the wavelength of light, and some awesome math that reminded me of my days in Computer Graphics graduate school, they’re able to make the light interfere with itself, not unlike the way noise canceling headphones work. Isn’t that cool?
https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/question615.htm
