The reflection tag has no wiki summary.
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Phase shift of 180 degrees on reflection from optically denser medium
Can anyone please provide an intuitive explanation of why phase shift of 180 degrees occurs in the Electric Field of a EM wave,when reflected from an optically denser medium?
I tried searching for it ...
4
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2answers
752 views
What happens to light in a perfect reflective sphere?
Let's say you have the ability to shine some light into a perfectly round sphere and the sphere's interior surface was perfectly smooth and reflective and there was no way for the light to escape.
If ...
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6answers
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What is the difference between a white object and a mirror?
I was taught that something which reflects all the colors of light is white. The function of a mirror is the same, it also reflects all light. What's the difference?
Update:
But what if the white ...
131
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14answers
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A mirror flips left and right, but not up and down
Why is it that when you look in the mirror left and right directions appear flipped, but not the up and down?
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6answers
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How come an anti-reflective coating makes glass *more* transparent?
The book I'm reading about optics says that an anti-reflective film applied on glass* makes the glass more transparent, because the air→film and film→glass reflected waves (originated from a paraxial ...
3
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2answers
595 views
How do mirrors work?
Apparently, light is just a certain wavelength, or "the visible spectrum" of electromagnetic waves. If I recall correctly, my physics teacher explained to me that electromagnetic waves are basically ...
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3answers
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Reflection At Speed of Light
I have looked online to no avail. There is two competing answers and I am curious to know which one is right.
Someone asked me this question. If you are traveling at the speed of light can you see ...
1
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1answer
995 views
Can you see yourself in a mirror when you are riding on top of a light stream?
What happens if you would ride on top of a light stream and you would look into a mirror that is in front of you, could you actually see your own face? I am asking this because I heard that nothing ...
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0answers
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Trigonometry in the plane mirror [closed]
I was trying to solve a problem taken from an Physics Olympiad when I came across a curious and complex mathematical expression. I can not prove with what I know so far about mathematics, does could ...
0
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1answer
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How are these balls reflected after they hit each other? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Physics of simple collisions
I have 2 photos of the balls, one before the collision and one after the collision. They do a elastic collision. I want to know how is the ...
34
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1answer
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Why does a window become a mirror at night?
In day, when you look in the room through the window out, you can clearly see what happens outside. At night when it's dark outside but there's light inside you can look in the window but it becomes a ...
8
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4answers
409 views
What longest time ever was achieved at holding light in a closed volume?
For what longest possible time it was possible to hold light in a closed volume with mirrored walls?
I would be most interested for results with empty volume but results with solid-state volume may ...
10
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3answers
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Is there a limit to the resolving power of a mirror telescope?
Like, if you flattened out Ceres to a 1 mm iron foil telescope mirror with 20x the surface area of the Sun, could you resolve details on the surface of an exoplanet? Could you make it arbitrarily ...
7
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2answers
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How does reflection work?
In Newton's model of light as being composed of particles, it's easy to imagine reflection as being the rebounding of individual corpuscles off a surface. However, since light can also behave like a ...
4
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3answers
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How can I determine transmission/reflection coefficients for light?
When light rays reflect off a boundary between two materials with different indices of refraction, a lot of the sources I've seen (recently) don't discuss the relation between the amplitude (or ...
4
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4answers
721 views
What happens when a photon hits a mirror?
When a photon of light hits a mirror does the exact same photon of light bounce back or is it absorbed then one with the same properties emitted? If the same one is bounced back does it's velocity ...
4
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2answers
297 views
How long do reflections take?
How long does it take for a photon to be reflected? Starting with the photon being absorbed by some atom to the point it's reemitted?
And what's the same point with pressure waves, like sound?
0
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0answers
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EM-wave hits a brick-wall, $\pi/2$ -phase-shift? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Phase shift of 180 degrees on reflection from optically denser medium
If I have a cord-wave, I get a phase-shift with attached cord but do I get such a phase-shift with ...
11
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3answers
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Why can't my eye see itself in the mirror through polarizing 3D-glasses?
I found a pair of polarizing "3D glasses" lying around, and tried to look at myself in the mirror while wearing them.
To my utter confusion, when closing the left eye and only looking through the ...
