Light travels in what kind of lines

Eyes, cameras Ears, microphones Can they be reflected? Yes Yes Can they be refracted? Yes Yes The speed of light Light travels extremely quickly. Yes if transparent or translucent. Eyes, cameras. For example, to understand the behaviour of light, two models are needed. Light needs to be thought of as both waves and particles.

Read about the LightSail project, a crowdfunded project from The Planetary Society, aiming to demonstrate that solar sailing is a viable means of propulsion for CubeSats miniature satellites intended for low Earth orbit. Add to collection. Light sources Something that produces light is called a light source.

The debate of whether light is made of waves or particles has been going for hundreds of years. Sir Isaac Newton thought that shadows proved that light was made of particles, but there is a lot of evidence that light is made of waves. Nature of science In order to understand the world we live in, scientists often use models. Go to full glossary Add 0 items to collection. Download 0 items. Twitter Pinterest Facebook Instagram. Email Us. See our newsletters here. Would you like to take a short survey?

This survey will open in a new tab and you can fill it out after your visit to the site. Figure 1. Three methods for light to travel from a source to another location. It can travel through media like air and glass.

It can also reflect from an object like a mirror. In the situations shown here, light interacts with objects large enough that it travels in straight lines, like a ray. Experiments, as well as our own experiences, show that when light interacts with objects several times as large as its wavelength, it travels in straight lines and acts like a ray.

Its wave characteristics are not pronounced in such situations. Since the wavelength of light is less than a micron a thousandth of a millimeter , it acts like a ray in the many common situations in which it encounters objects larger than a micron. For example, when light encounters anything we can observe with unaided eyes, such as a mirror, it acts like a ray, with only subtle wave characteristics. We will concentrate on the ray characteristics in this chapter. Since light moves in straight lines, changing directions when it interacts with materials, it is described by geometry and simple trigonometry.

This part of optics, where the ray aspect of light dominates, is therefore called geometric optics. There are two laws that govern how light changes direction when it interacts with matter.