How Pink Floyd Corrupted the Optics Debate

Pink Floyd’s famous album, the Dark Side of the Moon, has an illustration of a prism on its cover where white light is broken into different colors. This iconic image is beautiful in its simplicity, attracting the attention of anyone curious about optics and the nature of light.

Simple but wrong

However, the image is also wrong. Light doesn’t diffract on entry into a prism. It diffracts only on exit.

Careful observation of an actual diffraction shows this to be the case.

Diffraction
By D-Kuru – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 at, Link

This disconnect between Pink Floyd’s cover and the true nature of light is unfortunate. Because it has installed a false idea of reality into the minds of a lot of people.

Light is not waves

Many students of physics go their entire lives assuming that diffraction happens both at the entry and at the exit of a prism. This in turn, leads to the assumption that light is a wave phenomenon. Snell’s Law is frequently sited. Yet, all of this is incorrect. Light doesn’t behave like waves. It behaves like particles wrapped inside pilot waves.

This is a big deal because the behavior of light as it travels through a prism is the biggest mystery in optics. It’s at the heart of an age long debate over the true nature of light.

Confusion

The wide distribution of Pink Floyd’s cover has confused an issue that is of great importance in physics. It has muddled the waters, and sent people off on wild goose chases.

A great deal of time and effort has been wasted on the incorrect assumption that Pink Floyd was right.

However, any text on optics that profess that light diffracts at both the entry and exit of a prism can be ignored. Entire theories can be dismissed as fiction. They answer questions that only exist in the minds of people, but have no anchor in reality.

Damage

The damage done by Pink Floyd’s cover is so wide reaching that most school books on optics give the impression that light diffract on entry as well as exit through a prism. Many students of physics are not only exposed to an iconic image on a record album. They are also told at school that the image is factually correct. A very important debate on the nature of light has thus been thoroughly corrupted.