Application's of the Critical Angle and the Total Internal Reflection

On Monday's class we had a substitute and we reviewed what we did in the previous class and finished answering the example questions about critical ang

le, ---> --->

Critical angle is the measure of the angle of incidence when the angle of refraction is at 90 degrees. Once the angle of incidence is greater than the critical angle, total internal reflection will occur.

Then we were assigned to read pages 344-349 "Applications of the Critical Angle and the Total Internal Reflection", then you had to choose two of the applications you read and had to summarize each of them. The applications were :

Mirrors and Prisms- When light reflects off a mirror, about 10% of the light is lost. For good periscopes or binoculars have glass prisms that use total internal reflection. Almost no light is lost.

Fiber Optics- the light ray's enter the glass fiber and strikes the inside surface at an angle greater than the critical angle. The result is total internal reflection and so light bounce off the surface and keeps travelling through the fiber glass.

Sparkling Diamond- when light strikes the top surface of a diamond some light is reflected and some passes into the diamond and is refracted.

Twinkling and Shimmering- when stars seem to twinkle in the sky, it's not what it seems. when light is given off by the star's, the light enters the atmosphere and is refracted as it moves from one mass of air to another, and since the variable masses of air are in motion the star's seem to twinkle.

Mirages- there are two types of mirages inferior and superior. Inferior is when you are driving on a hot day and it seem's that there is water up ahead on the road, when really all it is, is an illusion. It is caused by when cool layers of air lie above warm layer of air. what your eyes see is a virtual image of the sky below the road.

There is also superior mirages which makes the object seem more up and farther away when really it is just denser layer's of air lie below less dense layer's. In this case light refracts towards the denser air, causing the image to look displaced upward.

We also answer some questions out of the text book Physics 11.

On Tuesday we just continued working on our assignments from the previous day and got our review for our test on Tuesday 29 2011.

Then on Wednesday Mr.Banow came back and we reviewed what we did in Monday and Tuesday's classes.

The next person to write the blog is the last person to have gotten a calculator for christmas...*cought* Mr. Banow! jk The last person with the most letters in there full name.