Timeline for Snell's law and Fermat's principle
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
3 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 25, 2019 at 11:09 | comment | added | Árpád Szendrei | @Kinka-Byo you are correct, the refraction index means that the incident angle and the refraction angle are correlated. In your case, light travels from point Q to point P, that is two fixed points in space. Since the incident angle and the refraction angle are correlated, and the two point are fixed in space, this makes the total path length fixed. Because there is only one point O, where the light has to enter the new medium (so it refracts in the right angle to go to point P). | |
| Jul 24, 2019 at 18:06 | comment | added | Kinka-Byo | Thank you for your answer. Regarding your sentence "you have to select this path so, that light travels the shortest in glass and the longest part of the total path in air" it seems to me that the light has a total path length which is fixed, and the refraction indeces decides the single lengths of the paths in each medium. But why is the total path fixed? | |
| Jul 24, 2019 at 15:40 | history | answered | Árpád Szendrei | CC BY-SA 4.0 |