Unit 10 Post - 7/19: Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Lights, mirrors, and reflections are truly some of the most complicated physics concepts we've yet to explore. Basically there are two different situations you can deal with, the Law of Reflections. If light hits a flat mirror, it reflects off of that mirror at the same angle it hit the mirror. The image will also be upright and not distorted. If light hits a concave mirror, the image will be distorted in both size and orientation and the beam of light doesn't come back at the same angle it contacted the mirror.

In this picture, I'm shining the light into a mirror, the light bounces off of it directly and at the same angle that it hit the mirror, and reflects onto my face! 

The other thing we learned today was about colors! Colors in physics are very different than colors in pigments. In physics the primary colors are blue, green, and red. All of them together make white and none of them make black. Green + red = yellow, green + blue = cyan, and blue + red = magenta. Complimentary colors are two colors that combine to make white, like yellow and blue. In class, it was so much fun playing with the lasers and the sheets of colored light because it make these confusing concepts really come to life!