# Tag Info

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
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
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
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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