Our backyard here in Florida has a lovely screened porch, and whenever I go out there with Lorna, I notice this interesting effect:
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This type of pattern is created by the electromagnetic waves from different sources cancelling each other out, but that's certainly not happening with our screen. Instead, the geometry of the situation leads to the gaps and wires of the mesh aligning in different ways. We can imagine looking through one screen at another moving horizontally:
As the wire from the moving screen passes through the gap of the stationary one, the amount of light is reduced, creating the darker regions seen in the photo. In this case, we're looking through the corner of two screens at right angles:
Because of the different distances between eye and screen, we end up in different points in the wire-gap pattern. I had trouble modeling those differing phases, and I suspect I've made an error somewhere, but the phase relation I get is
where the blue curve is the closer screen, and the red the more distant. That leads to a brightness pattern which looks like
While this does show brighter and darker patches, it seems to bear no resemblance to the type of pattern seen in quantum mechanics. I'm also not confident I have this correct, but I already spent too much time on debugging, so this will have to be another post with an unsatisfying conclusion!
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