It was nearly a century after Seeliger’s description of shadow hiding before scientists realized that there is another contributor to the opposition surge, which we mention only briefly here. It depends on the principle of constructive interference, which applies more in physics than in politics. Waves (in this case, light waves) that have their crests at the same places can add up to be especially strong (which makes the light bright). (Destructive interference, which may be more evident outside of the physics realm, occurs when troughs of one wave cancel crests of another.) We will not delve into why constructive interference tends to occur at opposition, but anyone with a thorough understanding of classical electromagnetic theory can work it out, as physicists did in the 1960s to 1980s. (More properly, it should be formulated not classically but quantum mechanically, but we recognize that some readers will prefer the former methodology because it is, as one physicist described it in 1968, "much simpler and more satisfying to the physical intuition." So, why make it hard?) For convenient use to ruin parties, the most common term for constructive interference in the opposition surge is coherent backscatter, but it sometimes goes by the other comparably self-explanatory terms weak photon localization and time reversal symmetry. Regardless of the name, as the light waves interact with the material they are illuminating at opposition, constructive interference can produce a surge in brightness.

The intensity of the opposition surge depends on the details of the material reflecting the light. Even the relative contributions of shadow hiding and coherent backscatter depend on the properties of the materials. (While both cause the reflected light to grow stronger as the angle to opposition shrinks, coherent backscatter tends to dominate at the very smallest angles.)

Especially sensitive laboratory measurements show that sometimes shadow hiding and coherent backscatter together are not sufficient to explain the result, so there must be even more to the opposition surge. The unique capability of science to explain the natural world, shown over and over and over again during the last half millennium, provides confidence that a detailed theoretical understanding eventually will be attained.

Part of science’s success derives from its combination of experiment and theory. For now, however, the opposition surge is more in the domain of the former than the latter. In other words, translating any opposition surge observation into a useful description of the properties of the reflecting material requires controlled laboratory measurements of well characterized materials. They provide the basis for interpreting the observation.