15
votes
Accepted
Was Einstein's General Theory of Relativity wrong?
The claim is incorrect. General relativity passes all of those tests and many more. In particular, many of the measurements of the deflection of light near the sun are made using VLBI with radio ...
- 65.8k
3
votes
Accepted
How to find the index of refraction of a glass cube with limited information?
Your substitution is the right way. Now use $\cos^2(x)+\sin^2(x)=1$ to find $n^2.$
- 3,435
2
votes
Accepted
Does the index of refraction of the sun's corona and solar wind contribute to the bending of light
Yes, modern observations of gravitational lensing by the sun account for refraction from the solar corona. The strength of refractive effects depend on the frequency (or wavelength) of light. Higher ...
- 5,460
2
votes
Accepted
Thin layer of air between lenses in contact
A thin layer of air (or any other medium for that matter) will have no impact on ray trajectories, image locations or image shapes, as long as (1) the layer is sufficiently thin, and (2) the radii of ...
- 7,634
1
vote
Glass Slab to Prism!
To understand this, look up ray tracing. Rather than coming up for a formula for each object the ray tracing approach is to break each problem into different regions and label the refractive index for ...
- 609
1
vote
Double refraction
This is actually somewhat complicated to work through and the somewhat tedious algebra depends on the details of the type of crystal. One reference that goes through the derivation is.
Quan-Ting Liang,...
- 609
1
vote
Accepted
What is the angle of a ray passing through a thin lens?
You can use almost the same equation as in the paraxial approximation. Just use slopes instead of angles.
Instead of $\theta'=\theta-\frac{y}{f}$, just use $m'=m-\frac{y}{f}$
No trig functions needed.
...
- 26
1
vote
What does light travel through or why it is independent of a medium?
Light, or electromagnetic waves, are just that, waves in the background electromagnetic fields. You could argue that they indeed have a medium, the EM field. This is similar to sound, which is ...
- 24k
1
vote
Calculating the time interval between sunrises with and without the atmosphere
The "standard" altitude given in the Astronomical Almanac, is that the center of the Sun should be 0.8333 degrees below the horizon to account for refraction. [For stars it's 0.5667]. Here ...
- 111
1
vote
Is refraction unpredictable?
In terms of light incident on an atom, refraction is forward scattering of photons, and is associated with a phase shift. That phase shift,
and the wavelength of light, defines a distance (and, with ...
- 8,955
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