The Law of Reflection

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Can anybody explain it? I don’t really get how it works.

In: Physics

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine a skateboarder standing very upright and rolling around on the mirror surface. Now change the skateboarder into a dotted line rolling around. If the mirror is curved, the skateboarder/dotted line will always face away from the mirror surface where it touches. The dotted line is used on diagrams to represent an imaginary reference line which stands at right angles to the mirror surface. The law of reflection just says that when a ray of light bounces off a mirror, the imaginary line will always be halfway between the inbound and outbound ray. We call the imaginary reference line ‘the normal.’