aka...science room
mirror
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
Your mirror may not be able to tell you whether you are the fairest of them all, but it will reflect your own image back at you. But you might not like what you see.
Depending on the shape of the mirror, your face may become larger or smaller and be upright or inverted. Only a plane, or flat, mirror will produce a faithful image of yourself.
Mirrors work because they have a highly polished surface. Light rays that are parallel to each other before they hit the mirror are still parallel once they have bounced off it and so an image can be formed.
You can’t see your reflection in a piece of paper because the surface is not smooth enough. The rough surface means that the reflected light is no longer parallel – it is scattered in all directions – so an image cannot be formed.
The law of reflection works for all surfaces and shapes of mirror:
>> the angle of incidence (i) = the angle of reflection (r)
The angles are measured to the normal, an imaginary line that can be drawn at right angles to the surface of the mirror.
When you look at an object in a mirror, your eyes are absorbing the reflected light rays. However, your brain works on the assumption that light always travels in straight lines. So, following the path of the rays backwards, your brain perceives an image behind the mirror. This image is called a virtual image.
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