My PHYSICS Tutorial !!!

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I haven't had much time to work with this, I've generated a view images, but haven't really completed the tutorial. So this is AS IS for now...

Figure 1

Here we have a mirror and a few cylinders (Figure 1). The small orangey dots are the grid... each cylinder is two units away from the mirror and each other... They are both equadistant from the yellow strip marking the center of the mirror. This yellow strip marks the normal to the mirror, and the angle between the normal and the two cylinders represent the angle of incidence and angle of reflection. Because the mirror is flat, the blue cylinder on the right has a virtual twin on the other side of the mirror, also two units away form the mirror. This is better illustrated in the following images...

Figure 2
Figure 3

Figure 2 is similar to the above image. Figure 3 describes the overall scene, where the blue and red cylinders are equadistant to the mirror and directly across from each other. In the left image, you can see the the blue cylinder's reflection appears in line with the red cylinder. No matter which way you rotate about the mirror, the blue cylinder's reflection and the red cylinder will line up.

An at-home experiment: get a styrofoam sheets, place a mirror on it, and use pins... Put down one close to you, in the clue cylinder's position. Note the reflected pin image and try to line up a pin on the other side of the mirror. Now look at the mirror from different sides, the reflection should always stay in line (or really close to being in line) with the other pin.

Figure 4
Figure 5

Figure 4 is a reflection of the leftmost red ball, as seen in the rightmost image. In Figure 5, there is a red ball and a rear reflection mirror (like the one in your bathroom) composed of a thin plate of glass and a mirrored surface behind it. The glass helps protect the reflective surface from scratches and such. The glass in the mirror will reflect the ball a little. Most of the light reflected off the ball travels through the mirror, but some is reflected off the front of the glass, as seen as the front edge of the reflected ball in the left image. The rest of the light form the ball is reflected off the mirrored surface. Most of this reflected light travels through the front of the glass, but some bounces off and is reflected back towards the mirror. This light hits the mirror and then head back towards the glass. Here, most of this diminished portion of reflected light passes through, giving you the darker red shadow to the right of the main reflected image.

SOME, however, gets reflected off the glass surface and heads towards the mirror again, reflecting off the mirror and towards the glass AGAIN... This reflection is very faint, because very little of the original light from the ball is still being reflected. But, you can see this very faint reflected image, marked with the red arrows. This process of reflection between the mirrored surface and the glass happens again and again, but it is very hard to find many more reflected images. With some mirroes, you can see a total of 5 or six images, if you are lucky. This Bryce version has four reflected images... the first off the glass, the second main one, the thrid dark red one, and the fourth faint one.

Try this at home, with your bathroom mirror: Put something vertical next to the mirror, and try to count its reflections. The lighter reflection usually show up better against a darker background I think, to increase the contrast. If you have a laser pen, you can try this: reflect the pen at different angles and count the number of laser dots that show up on a nearby wall. Careful, laser light is intense and should not be directed towards the eyes.

I'll add some text for the keliedescope later, but here are some images...

Thoughts and suggestions always welcome, this is just a quick tutorial, I'll get more together later when I have more free time. Enjoy the rest of my site...

4148 tuting people have visited this tute since 4/15/00.
Updated on Saturday, April 15th, 2000
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Email: waldo@bryce-alive.net