We have now reached a point where we can explain phenomena of optics in terms of our theory. The phenomena we'll look into are reflection, polarization, refraction and diffraction.
Reflection
In one of his crime novels, Henry Berg makes the observation that there is something profoundly strange about mirrors. How is it that a surface made up of atoms can perfectly reflect photons that are smaller than even an electron? From the perspective of a photon, an atom is like a mountain. The surface of a mirror is anything but flat. Yet, all photons striking a mirror leave at an equal and opposite angle, with no energy lost.
The answer to this riddle is that photons never strike the mirror. The pilot wave that accompanies every photon acts like a cushion, and it's off of this cushion that the photon bounces.
While photons are tiny, the pilot waves surrounding photons are big relative to atoms. They can easily even out a tolerably smooth surface without upsetting their host particle. Each photon sees a perfectly smooth cushion. They bounce off of this, unaffected by underlying irregularities in the surface of the mirror.
The phenomenon of reflection can in this way be seen as supporting evidence for the existence of pilot waves.
Polarization through reflection
Light reflected off a mirror at an angle ends up polarized. This means that every photon must have an axis along which it's oriented. Otherwise, no polarization is possible.
We can further conclude that photons end up aligning in parallel with the underlying surface when hit against the compressed cushions of their pilot waves.
Note that the orientation of the aligned photons is random when polarized in this way. On average, there are just as many photons oriented left to right as right to left.
This fits well with what we have thus far concluded about the photon, namely that it's an assembly corresponding to an electron and a positron. Assuming that the arrangement of particle quanta in electrons and positrons are directly reflected in photons, we end up with a two orb model of the photon, making them in essence tiny sticks, as illustrated above.
Transparent media
Henry Berg's observations related to mirrors apply just as much to transparent media. Without the help of pilot waves to smooth things out, photons would crash into electrons and atomic nuclei on their way through glass and water. Even air would be impossible to navigate. Photons would scatter, and their energies would be absorbed. However, once we include pilot waves in our analysis, things become a lot easier to explain.
Pilot waves smooth out irregularities that would otherwise lead to scatter. They act like dynamic cushions, guiding photons through the atomic lattice of transparent media.
This process greatly distort the shape of the pilot wave. It goes from being a flat wave-front to an elongated sock-like shape. This process requires photons to have a minimum of energy. They have to be big enough to do this. Very small photons are too much affected by their pilot waves to assert this kind of control over them. As a result, low energy photons get reflected by glass.
On the other hand, high energy photons are so big that their pilot waves have little control over them. High energy photons crash into atoms. They scatter, and their energies get absorbed.
This explains why glass is only transparent to photons in a certain range of energies. Glass is opaque to photons outside the visible spectrum, both to the high and low energy side.
Another thing to note is that all photons that make it through a transparent medium travel the same overall path. However, large photons roll form side to side while small photons stay safely in the middle of their pilot waves. As a consequence, small photons travel in a more direct line than their larger counterparts. This is why small (red) photons get through transparent media in less time than large (blue) photons.
Finally, we should note that the path through the medium is in a different direction from the path through air. The density of atoms in the medium makes the overall path through it more acute than the path on entry and exit. This phenomenon is referred to as refraction, and the degree to which this happen is referred to as the refraction index.
To understand why a photon's angle of entry into a sheet of plane glass is exactly equal to its angle of exit, we must once again consider the pilot wave. In simple terms, we can say that the process of exit is an exact opposite of entry. Instead of being compressed, the pilot wave expands. The various parts that were compressed on entry expand in a complementary manner on exit.
This is always the case for plane glass, where entry and exit surfaces are in parallel with each other. Furthermore, there's no diffraction. Light doesn't break into different colours. Nor is there any diffraction when the angle of exit is somewhat equal to that of entry. Pilot waves have the ability to maintain coherence between photons even when there's a slight difference in entry and exit angles.
However, in the case of a prism, where the surface met by the photon on entry has a very different angle from the one met on exit, we get diffraction. Photons don't only change their direction, they do so to a lesser or greater degree depending on their energy.
When diffraction happens, red photons diffract less than blue photons. This is because red photons make smaller rolls into glass, and hence smaller rolls out of glass than blue photons. When the exit angle is so different from that of entry that pilot waves fail to maintain coherence between photons, blue photons veer off to the side to a greater degree than the smaller red photons.
When the roll into glass is greatly different from the roll out of glass, we get a situation where we have to add the initial roll to the final roll. All photons end up redirected, but big photons are redirected more than small ones.
This explains why prisms diffract white light into different colours while plane glass sheets don't diffract light in any way. It also explains why diffraction of light happens in its entirety at exit from a prism. There's no diffraction on entry.
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