Can light be canceled by merging with an inverted wave? Can light waves be canceled by merging them with their inverted waves? Seems like it would violate conservation of energy but waves are added together when they overlap, right? Where is the flaw in this logic? I'm thinking polarized laser light, added to its opposite, might becomes dark again.
 -- Appreciating your collective wisdom.
 A: Yes - light waves can destructively interfere. This is the principle behind interferometers. There is no violation of energy conservation because the energy of two waves doesn't add. The energy is proportional to the square of the amplitude, and the amplitudes add. So $E\sim\left(A_1+A_2\right)^2\sim A^2_1+A^2_2+2A_1\cdot A_2$. The third term is an interference term between the two waves which can be negative and cancel the other two terms.
EDIT: Eduardo Guerras (validly) brings up a point about global cancellation versus local cancellation of waves. A local cancellation is simply the interference phenomenon I mentioned and there is absolutely no problem with it. Global cancellation is a different beast. You cannot, using any real combinations of sources, arrange for the global cancellation of waves. In fact, a global cancellation of just about anything is a sign that you have used an inappropriate mathematical abstraction, such as infinite plane waves, which simply don't exist in reality.
There is a sense in which global cancellation is fine, but pointless. If you have one wave (take a scalar wave $\phi\left(x,y,x,t\right)$ instead of an electromagnetic wave for simplicity)
$$\phi_1\left(x,y,x,t\right)$$
and another
$$\phi_2\left(x,y,x,t\right)$$
which just happens to be $\phi_2 = -\phi_1$ everywhere at all times, then the sum of the two is clearly zero and you have global cancellation. But in a very trivial this is the same as there being no wave at all to start with. What you definitely cannot do is produce such a pair of waves from a source - a simple application of the wave equation in this instance shows that the source must vanish. So the whole idea of a global cancellation is trivial and pointless in practice. That is why I assumed you were referring to a local cancellation, but I should have been clear from the start.
A: I cannot be sure that this answer is correct, but I have an argument whereby global cancellation Is possible.
That is when an electron absorbs a photon, it does a jump, and that jump I would arguing is the same as the jump that would normally take shake it's field to produce a photon, and I argue that that IS what is happening, only it is a perfect opposite of the photon being absorbed.
Both photons then continue to travel locked together representing zero energy and being undetectable be any means yet devised.
So the conservation of energy is, er, conserved because the energy has been absorbed.    In other words photons being cancelled in this fashion is happening all the time all around you!
