Since your eyes are pointed towards the mirror, how can you make eye contact with someone else? Well, quite simply, because it’s not you, but your mirror reflection that makes eye contact with the person to whom you are talking. You have probably been in the situation countless times when you’re looking at the mirror, but also talking to someone at the same time… while maintaining eye contact! How does that happen? Do you notice how the woman’s reflection is looking at the camera, but the lady herself isn’t? (Image Credit: freestockphotos) However, the one example (related to visible light) that we come across almost every day is related to the mirrors we have in our homes. There are countless examples where the law of reflection comes into play, primarily because the law of reflection works not only for visible light, but other electromagnetic radiation as well. The ability to predict the ball’s trajectory goes a long way in making someone good at sports like tennis, table tennis etc. The life and success of a tennis player becomes much easier if they are skilled in those particular predictions. The reason the tennis example was appropriate is that it shows how important it is, in a game like tennis, to be able to predict how a projectile (i.e., the tennis ball) is going to behave. However, we’re not here to talk about tennis. If you’re not good at tennis, then you might not be very good in this particular department. If you are a tennis player, particularly a good one, you must be quite good at estimating the path that the ball will follow just by looking at the way it was hit by your opponent. It also states that the angle the incident ray makes with the normal is equal to the angle that the reflected ray makes with the normal. The law of reflection (in physics) states that when a light ray is incident on a plane surface, the incident ray, the reflected ray and the “normal” to the surface of the mirror all lie in the same plane. The angle of incidence is the angle at which the ray of light hits the surface, and the angle of reflection is the angle at which the ray of light reflects off the surface. The law of reflection is the principle that when a ray of light hits a surface, the ray of light will reflect off the surface at the same angle as it hit the surface. Angle Of Incidence And Angle Of Reflection.So the length of the path ACB is the shortest possible between A and B which touches the mirror. The line segment AB' is the shortest of all possible paths between A and B'.ĪB' intersects the mirror at C. How can you draw the the light ray so it reaches B in the shortest time? It must travel along the shortest path.ĭraw the mirror image of B: it is B'. You want the light reach from A to B in the way that it is reflected from the horizontal mirror. In other words, a ray of light prefers the path such that there are other paths, arbitrarily nearby on either side, along which the ray would take almost exactly the same time to traverse. However, this version of the principle is not general a more modern statement of the principle is that rays of light traverse the path of stationary optical length with respect to variations of the path. This principle is sometimes taken as the definition of a ray of light. In optics, Fermat's principle or the principle of least time is the principle that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time.
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