Sunday, March 14, 2010

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...Wait There's More Than One...


When I opened the bathroom cabinet, I realized that the mirror doors created multiple reflections like in one of our labs. When the door opens all the way like in the first picture, the two planar mirrors are perpendicular to each other and they create 3 images. An image is created each time light rays bounce off the object, hit a mirror, and then reflect into my eyes. The images in front of the mirror are real and the images on the opposite side of the mirror from me and the camera are virtual. The virtual images behind the mirrors are the same distance away from the mirrors as my finger is from the mirrors. The virtual images cannot be seen but I could see the real images if I held a piece of paper in the correct place in front of the mirror. When I opened two of the doors at the same time like in the second picture, I saw many, many images because there was an image everytime the object or an image of the object existed in front of a mirror.

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