A perfect mirror would reflect all light. Could light be contained by a box made with these mirrors on all interior surfaces? Also, where does light go? It is said that white surfaces reflect all colors, while black surfaces absorb them. Is the light absorbed or just the colors? If light is absorbed, where does it go? Is the answer that it is converted to heat? What is this process of transformation? And and and...
2006-08-02 07:21:33 · 5 answers · asked by rrrrandog 2 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
It is true you need the box to be completely empty (vacum), and you need it to be spherical (because the light will get absorbed in the corners). Besides, it's true you can't see/measure it because any detector will absorb the light. It is also true tunnelling could get photons out of the box, but if the perfect reflecting layer of the mirrors are thick enough (a few nanometers) the probability is extremely low and you will need several megayears to get rid of all of them.
About black and white: a black surface absorbs all colours in the same way, and white reflects all of them the same again, but this doesn't mean all the light is absorbed/reflected. If any of the colours is reflected/absorbed slightly differently the surface will show up being that colour or its complementary one.
And yes, light is electromagnetic energy, and when it interacts with matter several things can happen. Of course it can be transformed into heat, but it can also trigger a chemical reaction (like when taking a picture), generating a current (photoelectric effect) and so on.
If you want to visualize the light-heat transformation, imagine a photon shocking into a particle in the absorbing surface. That impact will make the particle move (and/or vibrate if it is tightly fixed to the surface microscopic structure). You know that temperature is a measurment of the mean kinetic energy of the particles in a body: you get more movement so you increase the temperature. voilá
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2006-08-02 11:49:51 · answer #1 · answered by Hobbes 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
If you had a perfectly enclosed box of mirrors, you could capture light. But it would be of no use because you cannot see light while it is travelling, only when it reflects off of something. White surfaces reflect the visible spectrum of light, and black surfaces absorb the visible spectrum of light. Light is energy, and when it hits a surface, some of it is reflected, and some of it is absorbed to produce heat. Look up the Wikipedia article on light.
2006-08-02 07:31:19 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
The answer is no, not indefinitely.
You could trap it for quite a while depending
on the box size, but eventually the laws of
quantum mechanics would get you. There is
always a small but nonzero probability that the
photons will jump to the other side of the mirror
and go out of the box or absorb in the material.
It is called tunneling.
2006-08-02 07:43:49 · answer #3 · answered by PoohP 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
No, maximum mirrors are both silvered, and silver has a about ninety 8% performance in reflecting gentle. That 2 p.c. loss will enable all the gentle get away in a tiny fraction of a second. despite the indisputable fact that, evaluate the party of quite a few the the first lasers, A ruby rod, heavily silvered at one end, and gentle silvered at the different. gentle changed into pumped in and bounced decrease to and fro between both mirrors and the vast majority got here out the gently silvered end.
2016-11-27 21:02:54 · answer #4 · answered by ? 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It would have to be a perfect vacuum as well.
I'm not sure the quantum tunneling effect mentioned above would cause light to "tunnel" through to the other side of a mirror. Quantum tunneling effects occur on a nanoscopic scale and wouldn't be large enough to cause the light to penetrate a mirror.
2006-08-02 08:49:00 · answer #5 · answered by Will 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋