When people look into a mirror, they see an image of themselves behind the glass. That image results from light rays encountering the shiny surface and bouncing back, or reflecting, providing a ...

Light energy travels in straight lines and in waves. Light energy travels in straight lines and in waves. When light strikes a plane or a flat surface, it reflects in a manner that is predictable. For ...

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Without light, we can't have sight. We see objects because of how light interacts with those objects, our eyes pick up that light, and our brains interpret it. This seems rather ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

In my previous Photography Snapshot, I discussed the importance of light and how it bounces to create images. We discovered that the most primitive form of photography was the camera obscura, which ...

Created more than 400 years ago, the telescope is a tool that has allowed both amateurs and scientists alike to explore the sky in much more detail than they ever could with their naked eyes. All ...

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery has led ...

This film demonstrates the measurement of the speed of light in both air and water using experimental setups. The first experiment involves measuring the time it takes for light to travel a known ...