From the 1950s, the Brewster angle is being taught as a zero-reflection angle. But that practice is like telling only an incomplete introduction to a story. Brewster himself would not have recognized this angle to be a zero-reflection angle. Instead, his purely experimental work convinced him to think of his angle as a polarizing angle. Great ideas always have more in them than meets the eye. The polarizing angle comes about because of a specific decoupling of the reflected plane waves from the incident plane waves, and the essence of the Brewster phenomenon is the Brewster wavenumber.
87. A. Lakhtakia, 'Would Brewster recognize today's Brewster angle?' OSA Optics News, 15 (6), 1989, 14 - 18.Updated on: April 20, 2011
104. A. Lakhtakia, 'On extending the Brewster law at planar interfaces,' Optik, 84, 1990, 160 - 162.
113. A. Lakhtakia, 'On pathological conditions and Fresnel coefficients,' International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 11, 1990, 1407 - 1413.
145. A. Lakhtakia & J.R. Diamond, 'Reciprocity and the concept of the Brewster wavenumber,' International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 12, 1991, 1167 - 1174.
158. A. Lakhtakia, 'Green's functions and Brewster condition for a halfspace bounded by an anisotropic impedance plane,' International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 13, 1992, 161 - 170.
170. A. Lakhtakia, 'General schema for the Brewster conditions,' Optik, 90, 1992, 184 - 186.
174. A. Lakhtakia, 'Brewster condition for planar interfaces of natural optically active media,' Zeitschrift für Naturforschung A, 47, 1992, 921 - 922.
192. J.J. Ditri & A. Lakhtakia, 'The Brewster wavenumber concept for elastodynamics,' Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 1993, 576 - 579.
197. A. Lakhtakia, 'An unidirectionally conducting screen is a super-Brewster screen,' Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, 6, 1993, 663 - 665.
258. A. Lakhtakia, 'The essence of the Brewster phenomenon: Brewster wavenumbers,' International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, 32, 1995, 369 - 370.