Does light reflect if incident at exactly the critical angle?

A lot of textbooks and exam boards claim that light incident at exactly the critical angle is transmitted along the media boundary (i.e. at right-angles to the normal), but this seems to violate the principle of reversibility in classical physics. How would a photon or ray travelling in the reverse direction "know" when to enter the higher refracting medium? It can't know, so I conclude that such light is simply reflected?

Is this correct?

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When the angle is smaller than the critical angle, we get refraction. At the critical angle, $\theta_2$ of the refraction becomes 90 degrees, so we get the tangent propagation. At angles larger than the critical ones, there is a discontinuity: the equation for $\theta_2$ (arcsine of something) has no solutions which is why we get a total internal reflection.
But that's not a problem because the probability that the direction of light is "exactly" tangent to the boundary is zero. In a real-world situation, the light will be a superposition of beams with angles $\theta_2=\pi/2-\epsilon$ for various small values of $\epsilon$, and for any nonzero $\epsilon$, the light will know very well when it hits the boundary. So your problem only occurs at a negligible, "measure zero" portion of the situation, so it is at most a "measure zero" problem. When one adds the appropriate degree of realism and specifies the precise angles and deviations from the "idealized model", the problem goes away.
 I agree this is not a real world problem, since it has measure zero, rather it is a question about whether textbooks and exam boards are correct. However it does seem from your answer (which I agree with) that we should remove the middle diagram from the illustration and just say that light relects internally at angles greater than or equal to the critical angle, and refract at smaller angles. It simplifies the answer and is (more) correct. – Michael C Price Jan 30 at 12:28 It is not more correct. Note that reciprocity holds. Suppose you have an infinite medium with an interface as pictured above, then a plane wave (which rays represent) propagating exactly in the $-x$ direction would have an electric field vector in the $y$ direction, exciting the medium, and resulting in the a refracted ray. At the photon level, the electric field would be realized by the interaction of the photons with the medium... – daaxix Jan 30 at 21:48 Also, the above diagrams assume a lossless (i.e. purely real index of refraction) medium, which doesn't exist so far. See this interesting discussion on this issue : osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_21/issue_1/features/… – daaxix Jan 30 at 22:49 @Daaxix, the assumption of a lossless medium is not a problem for a gendanken experiment, which strip away such irrelevant details to expose the physical principles underneath. – Michael C Price Jan 31 at 14:36 Yes. Like I said, in the gendanken experiment, there isn't a problem either and reciprocity holds at the critical angle. – daaxix Jan 31 at 14:42