The wrong kind of filter — a linear filter for a circularly polarized photon, or vice versa — not only won't elicit any information; it also will destroy the information contained in the photon.
Not exact matches
If you are a man looking for an interracial partner, but want to
filter out the
wrong kind of interracial partner, you can do so, getting rid
of matches in the
wrong location, or in the
wrong category
of income, lifestyle, and so on.
Don't get me
wrong, that
filtering process led to a lot
of great work getting published over the years, and even made a lot
of that work better than it would have been otherwise, but I would guess that for every success story
of that
kind there are just as many books that went through the wood - chipper
of legacy publishing and came out the other side half the product it once was.
I agree with you that having some
kind of selective
filter just seems
wrong.
You may believe that there is no special
filter that can be made for energetic particles
of any
kind, but your belief is
wrong.
Steve can correct me if I'm
wrong, but I think the grey line is the data, and the black line is some
kind of filtered average.