Laws of Reflection

Tuesday, October 25

Today we took notes on the laws of reflection. The general rule for this concept is the angle of incidence must be equal to the angle of reflection.

The incident ray is the incoming ray while the reflected ray is the outgoing ray. The red line in this diagram is referred to as the normal and is usually drawn as a dotted line. The point at where the incident ray strikes the mirror is known as the point of incidence. You can also see that the angle of incidence = the angle of reflection which it should. Both the incident and reflected ray as well as the normal all lie in the same plane.

Wednesday, October 26

This diagram illustrates the characteristics of an image in a plane mirror. The image is the same size as the object, it is upright and laterally inverted. It is also virtual.

We also measured incident angles and used the normal to draw the reflected angle. The incident ray has arrows going toward the plane mirror while the reflected ray has arrows going away from the plane mirror. To end class off we had a plane mirror race. I beat everyone:)

The next blog will be written by whoever owns a special olympic cobalt:)