From Huygens to Entanglement: Bridging Optics, Mechanics, and Quantum Physics Across 350 Years

The talk explores a quantitative connection between Huygens’s legacies in wave optics and classical mechanics. Optical polarization, coherence and entanglement are related to mechanical quantities including centre of mass and moment of inertia. Distributions of classical point masses provide a representation of nonseparability in optical fields, and the correspondence extends to quantum states of two qubits. These mappings offer an intuitive way to examine entanglement and the shared mathematical structure of mechanics, classical optics and quantum physics.