see:
Light Polarization
Benjamin Perry
Chase Young
where the flying fuck in the flying fucking world is flying fucking lisa randall
inb4 permaband
Noah Long
and a better question is who killed the fucking war star?
Easton Collins
I don't know why no one has posted an image like this, but it's much easier to understand with a visual aid. Unpolarized light has an infinite number of waves overlapped (called a "superposition") in an infinite number of orientations. A polarizer filters out all the waves except for those of a specific orientation. The resultant light has electrical and magnetic poles, kinda sorta like a magnet.
This is a layperson explanation and not 100% accurate, but it should get you started. Here's a video on the Faraday effect, which shows how the polarized light can then be manipulated by a magnetic field.
youtube.com
Mason Campbell
this is helpful. What happens when the light in the figure hits the horizontal polarizer? does it die?
Isaiah Nguyen
It gets absorbed