Two behaviours only waves can pull off: bending around obstacles and being filtered by orientation. Diffraction and polarisation are light's wave credentials - and Malus' law makes the second one quantitative. This is the real knowscape from knowhere, not a picture of one. Drag it. Watch what actually changes.
Light behaves like a wave, and every phenomenon here is a bet on that: diffraction spreads it, polarisation filters it by orientation, and Malus's law counts what survives. Newton called light particles and lost this round — because only waves bend around edges and dim by cos-squared through a filter.
The music sits packed at the doorway, a single narrow gap to the next room.
Sound spills through and bends around the edges instead of going straight.
Waves spread wide across the whole room — a narrower gap spreads more.
This concept has no prerequisites in knowhere's map — it is a root. Everything in the topic is built from here.
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