Sorry I didn't see this before...
Okay, I see two major problems with this student's experiment:
1) Nitric acid Won't Dissolve in Methane
Nitric acid is what's called a mineral acid. That means it is inorganic (it doesn't contain carbon) and dissolves in water.
Methane is an organic molecule (it contains carbon). It literally cannot dissolve nitric acid. Here's why:
For nitric acid (HNO3) to dissolve into a solvent, that solvent must be polar. It must have a charge to pull the positively charged Hydrogen off of the Oxygen. Methane has no charge, since its carbon and hydrogens have nearly perfect covalent bonds. Thus it cannot dissolve nitric acid. There will be no solution. That leads to the next problem:
2) He's Not actually Measuring a Solution
He's picking up the pH of the pure nitric acid. Since it didn't dissolve, what's left isn't a solution—it's like mixing oil and water. He has groups of methane and groups of nitric acid. Since methane is perfectly neutral (neither acid nor base), the electronic instrument is only picking up the extremely acidic nitric acid. There's no point to what he's doing.
Does that help?
Answer:
Explanation:
When the unpolarized light passes through the first polarizer, only the component of the light parallel to the axis of the polarizer passes through.
Therefore, after the first polarizer, the intensity of light passing through it is halved, so the intensity after the first polarizer is:
Then, the light passes through the second polarizer. In this case, the intensity of the light passing through the 2nd polarizer is given by Malus' law:
where
is the angle between the axes of the two polarizer
Here we have
So the intensity after the 2nd polarizer is
And substituting the expression for I1, we find:
