Nick on Nostr: I'm curious if anyone has found a good, succinct way to explain light polarization to ...

I'm curious if anyone has found a good, succinct way to explain light polarization to someone who has no formal knowledge about electricity and magnetism.

I find this vexing, because polarization is conceptually pretty simple: it's just about the direction in which a transverse wave does the waving. So it's easy to explain if you're talking about, say, waves on a string. The problem is that what is doing the waving here, the electromagnetic field, isn't really familiar to most people (if they haven't taken some physics classes). I've tried before to give explanations that sort of talk around the "what exactly is doing the waving" angle, but then the explanation just sounds oddly vague or abstract.

I've also talked to other people who have had the same problem, so I suspect there just isn't a very good way, but maybe someone out there has come up with a particularly clever way to approach it.