Want to Know How Light Works? Try Asking a Mechanic

TL;DR:

> Once the team visualized a light wave as part of a mechanical system, new connections between the wave’s properties immediately became apparent — including the fact that entanglement and polarization stood in a clear relationship with one another.

> “This was something that hadn’t been shown before, but that becomes very clear once you map light’s properties onto a mechanical system,” said Qian. “What was once abstract becomes concrete: using mechanical equations, you can literally measure the distance between ‘center of mass’ and other mechanical points to show how different properties of light relate to one another.”