The claim some years ago, contrary to all textbooks, that the angular momentum of a photon (and gluon) can be split in a gauge-invariant way into an orbital and spin term, sparked a major controversy in the Particle Physics community. A further cause of upset was the realization that the  gluon polarization in a nucleon, a supposedly physically meaningful quantity, corresponds only to the gauge-variant gluon spin derived from  Noether's theorem, evaluated in a particular gauge. But that sort of thing doesn't seem to worry the Laser Physicists who have, for decades,  been happily measuring physical quantities which correspond to photon orbital and spin angular momentum evaluated in a particular gauge. My talk aims to reconcile the two points of view, and shows that it is the gauge invariant version of the canonical angular momentum which agrees with the results of a host of laser optics experiments.