Sunday, March 13, 2011

Mirrors

This chapter in physics we learned about mirrors, light, and lenses.  I thought this was an especially interesting topic because it is something everyone sees on an everyday basis.  We all use and see lights everyday, we all have mirrors all over are houses and even in our cars and most of us use glasses or contacts on a daily basis.  But, we do not all know how all these things work.  That is the problem we solved in physics during the past week and a half or so.  The aspect that interested me the most is mirrors.  I see mirrors everywhere i go.  I have mirrors in my bedroom, my bathrooms, in my car and they are also all over the place.  A fun fact that i learned is that we only need a mirror that is half of our height in order to see a full view of our body in it.  This means that in the future when i buy a mirror it will only need to be about 3 feet long.  I also learned why the side-view mirrors on my car say "objects may appear closer than the are."  This is because the side-view mirrors are convex mirrors.  This means that they bulge outward.  Because of this bulge it makes the light it is reflecting diverge.  This essentially means that it grabs a lot of light from a big area and puts it into a smaller image which we see.  They uses these types of mirrors on cars so you can see a wider range.  They also use this in parking structures so you can see around the corner.