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Middle school physics - NGSS
Course: Middle school physics - NGSS > Unit 4
Lesson 4: Absorption and reflectionAbsorption and reflection
Light will travel in a straight line until it reaches the boundary of a material. When it interacts with the new material it can behave in a few ways. This depends on the frequency of the light and the material it interacts with. Learn about two possible behaviors, absorption and reflection.
Created by Sal Khan.
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- how many times can light be reflected?(3 votes)
- Light can be reflected any number of times if the material it's reflecting off of doesn't absorb any of the light. If the material does absorb some light, eventually there will basically be no light left to keep reflecting. Does that help?(9 votes)
- what happen when the light is refracted when go through the water? can it reflected again?(3 votes)
- When light is refracted it just changes direction a little bit. After that, it can still be reflected. Light only stops when it is absorbed.(7 votes)
- iN THE VIDEO, tHeRe Is PICTURE oF MOUnTAiNS rIghT? WhAt If ThE uPSIde doWN (oR REfLeCtIOn) Is a gaTeway To a diMEnsioN?(5 votes)
- wHaT hAPPens WHen YoU pUT 2 mIrrrORS IN faCE WIth EACHOtHeR??(3 votes)
- You get infinity 🔲∞🔲(3 votes)
- what if there is no light for months what would happen(3 votes)
- We wouldn't survive.(1 vote)
- u said it was like the sun can it blind u like the sun(0 votes)
- The light from the sun is reflected off of the snow in the video. Very little light is being absorbed, but the snow is not blinding you like the sun would. Why? Because not all of the light from the sun is reaching earth, and not all of the light from the sun that reaches earth is hitting the snow on the mountain. And that’s why the light that is reflected off of the snow in the picture doesn’t blind you like the sun would.(1 vote)
- what happens if light never reaches a material does it keep going endlessly?(0 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] I'm showing
you this beautiful picture of snow-capped mountains
overlooking this Alpine Lake, because there's a lot
of light moving around. Now, we're gonna talk
about the different ways that light can interact
with different media, but what I'm talking about can
generally be true of waves. But focusing on light for a second, we've already talked about how, if we go from one medium to another, if we're transmitting from
one medium to another, that the light can go through a medium. And as it goes to that boundary
from one medium to another, its direction can change. And we talk about that in another video, and we call that refraction. We have refraction when
we enter the material, and then we have more
refraction when we get out. Now, there's other things
that light can also do, and that's the focus of this video, reflection and absorption. Now you probably have a sense of what happens with reflection. We can see a reflection of the mountains in the lake right over here. And the reason why we
can see the reflection of the mountains and the lake here is because light that is
coming from this mountain is hitting the lake and then
it is bouncing off of it, and then coming to an observer's
eyeball right over here, and so they see the light
that's coming from here, they see it as coming from over here, because it is bounced off. And so reflection is exactly
that, light is coming in, it hits that other material, and then if it bounces
off, that's reflection. Now, the other thing that
light can do is get absorbed. Absorbed is when the
material doesn't reflect any, it doesn't transmit any through it, if it's completely absorbing. And so that would be
a situation like this. Now, the reality in the real world is we have oftentimes a little bit of all of the above happening. For example, when we look
at this white snow up here, this is reflecting pretty well. So there's light that's
coming from the sun, or maybe it's being
reflected off of the clouds, or maybe it's getting through the clouds, and when it hits that
snow, it gets reflected. Now, the reason why we
don't see a reflection the way that we see in
this lake right over here is the snow reflects it in
all different directions, but the fact that it's
that bright color, in fact, you might need sunglasses
to look at the snow, just as much as you
need to look at the sky, is that it's reflecting most of the light. But if you go down here
where we see the trees, the same light from the sky is hitting it, but not as much light is
coming back to our eye, and that's because this
part of the mountain, it might be trees, it might
be rock, it might be dirt, is absorbing more of the light, but it's still reflecting some. We can still see it a little bit. So this might be where most
of it is getting absorbed, but a little bit of the
light gets reflected, which we can see right over there. And if we think about the
water right over here, some of the light is
probably making it through and probably refracting as it does so. Some of it is getting absorbed as it makes its way through the water. If this was a really deep lake, when you get to the bottom,
it could be very, very dark. And then, as we talked about, it looks like a good bit is reflecting. When we look at the image
that we see in the lake, it looks almost as
bright as the real thing. So as I said, this is
happening all around you. In fact, when people make
fancy computer graphics, they actually try to do
exactly what the light would do in the real world to make
an image for your eyes that look like the real world. And they're thinking exactly about this. How much gets through the substance? How much gets reflected,
and how much gets absorbed? And as I mentioned, it's not just light waves that do this. Waves in general can do all of the above.