Lasers and Mirrors -Period 1

Today in class we discussed our homework which was how an image would look in the back of your eye. We drew a ray diagram and we saw that all rays cross right as they go into the pupil, which was just like our cardboard experiment. The light rays, instead of crossing at the whole in the cardboard, cross at the pupil. The other part of our homework was how does your brain process the image and we learned that in the brain, the image gets flipped so that we see it right side up.

We also discussed why different colors affect the laser. We cam to the conclusion that some colors absorb more light and some colors reflect more. But then we had an idea. What does the light look like on different surfaces? So we got a mirror to see what would happen with the laser on it. My group saw that you can see the light in the mirror but you could also see it on some other object just as clearly because the light is reflected off of the mirror. Conor also had a good idea. His idea was that i you point the laser at a 35 degree angle onto the mirror, it will reflect off at a 35 degree angle so that the two angle would be congruent. The Finley told us that even though our hypothesis worked with a flat mirror, will it work with a curved mirror? Finley had another question for us which was does the laser hit more that one point on the mirror? Yolanda had a good idea that if we hit the laser at any point on the curved mirror, that it would work just like a flat mirror and reflect the laser off at the same angle just like a flat mirror. We all eventually agreed on that and Finley also told us that the laser only hits one place on the mirror. After that Finley gave us a new vocabulary word, normal. He said that the normal is perpendicular to the line that the laser is reflecting off of. So our conclusion for the class was that light bounces off of a mirror at the same angle that you pointed the laser, no matter if the mirror is flat or curved.

KM