Brick Top
New Member
i went into my back yard and did a test. I took a large mirror and faced it at the sun, and i reflected to light from the sun Though a window in my house and lit up a wall..... how did i reflect light off a mirror if it aborbs the light?????? maybe my mirror must be broke or something. to be fair i will try a differnt mirror, because the one i use could have malfuntioned.
Only small amounts of light energy are absorbed by mirrors.
Mirrors come in two basic varieties. The most common are metallic mirrors like those found on the walls of Versailles or on medicine cabinets. Metallic mirrors work pretty well, but they have limitations. The most important is that they waste energy, absorbing a small fraction of the light that falls on them. That is because when light, which, like radio waves, is a form of electromagnetic radiation, strikes a metallic mirror the electrons in the metal move just as they do when a radio signal strikes an antenna. Pushing electrons around takes energy, which dims the reflected image. So metallic mirrors cannot be used in applications like communications and high-powered lasers, where minimizing energy loss is important.
From: M.I.T. Scientists Turn Simple Idea Into 'Perfect Mirror'
http://phys.lsu.edu/~jdowling/mit.html