I just came across a really cool article about some neat stuff that math-loving physicists are doing with light. They’re actually taking math skills and applying them in an artistic way to knot light beams into cool designs. Things I learned from this article:

• Light doesn’t always travel in a straight line. It might also travel in swirls and curlicues. Cool stuff.
• There are dark lines that fill in the space between light. Makes sense but who knew?
• Holograms can be used to alter the shape of light. That’s basically what they did to create these light knots. Basically each point of the hologram is used to shape the light around a dark knot.
• Knots have been made from light before but not like this. Previous attempts to do this have created a series of intertangled knots whereas the knots from this scientific project were all single knots.
• You could do this yourself … if you had a hologram and a laser beam.

Tags: hologram, light knots, livescience, science, science knots