What is the difference between a white and a mirrored surface?

Question

Since white surfaces reflect all the light that strike them, as do mirrors, why is it that mirrors have reflections and not whiteboards?
My guess is that white surfaces scatter light, while mirrors do not. Is this correct? Any sources?

Answer 1

Yes, your thinking is correct. White surfaces have particle size which favors scattering, unlike mirrors. In general matte surfaces scatter light and polished surfaces reflect light. So even a highly polished black surface is somewhat reflective.

Answer 2

Differences in microstructure: A white surface has DISCRETE valence energy levels covering the visible range. A mirror has CONTINUOUS energy band spanning the visible range.

Differences in interactions with visible lights: A white surface absorbs the continuum of visible light and and then RE-EMITS (with energy level, that is frequency, shifts) as many discrete frequencies as enough to fool the eyes into seeing a white color. A mirror surface REFLECTS the continuum of visible light.

By the way, the two mechanisms are totally different. Absorption is by elevating the valence electrons to their higher energy bands. Reflection is by using the good conductivity to zero out the electric field of the waves at the surface thus generating a reflected wave having the starting phase the negation of the phase of the incident wave at the interface. This zero sum phase reflection is key to explaining the concept of left-right mirror symmetry that the human brain cannot readily tell apart. A typical (iso-refringent) mirror surface also produces higher-order effects such as reversing a right-hand circularly polarized wave into a left-hand circularly polarized one upon reflection. I speculate that the human brain for millions of years somehow has adapted to overlooking these higher-order idiosyncrasies from natural objects' refections: without them or with them (as long as the first-order dimensional details are the same), surprisingly, makes no difference to the perceived images of natural objects. Only when we view certain non-natural objects that we are trained well to quickly micro-identify, such as a line of English text, the brain then can tell that the mirrored image is not the same as the directly viewed one.

Answer 3

rather sharpening a white floor by putting wax on it isn't the comparable as a mirror. mild nevertheless penetrates the polish and gets scattered in all instructions by the white floor decrease than. there's no tough floor for mild to get scattered by a mirror.

Answer 4

yes...your answer is dead on, it even works with light outside the visable range, ie ultra violet etc.