jlarussa
Many Me by Jacquelyn LaRussa
Jacquelyn LaRussa
Many Me
Contrived
Have you ever stood between two plane parallel mirrors and wondered why there were so many images of you? The answer to this question has to do with the angle between the two mirrors and the physics involved in reflection. When looking into a plane mirror the Law of Reflection determines that the image you see will appear to be situated in front of the mirror, it will be horizontally inverted, and the size of the imaged object will be the exact same size as the actual object. You can see this demonstrated in the right of my picture as my image is shown in the mirror on my bathroom wall. When two plane mirrors are placed in front of each other with the angle between them approaching zero, the number of images that are seen approaches infinity. As you can see in the left of my photo, each of the two mirrors that I strategically placed next to my bathroom mirror produces an image due to the singles reflection of light off one of the mirror faces to my eye. The remaining images are produced as a result of multiple reflections of light off more than one of the mirror faces. My image gets smaller and smaller in the mirror on the left because each time it is reflected back the image is used as the object. My first reflected image becomes the object to produce the second reflected image and so on, decreasing the size of the image each time it is reflected.
Many Me by Jacquelyn LaRussa
Jacquelyn LaRussa
Many Me
Contrived
Have you ever stood between two plane parallel mirrors and wondered why there were so many images of you? The answer to this question has to do with the angle between the two mirrors and the physics involved in reflection. When looking into a plane mirror the Law of Reflection determines that the image you see will appear to be situated in front of the mirror, it will be horizontally inverted, and the size of the imaged object will be the exact same size as the actual object. You can see this demonstrated in the right of my picture as my image is shown in the mirror on my bathroom wall. When two plane mirrors are placed in front of each other with the angle between them approaching zero, the number of images that are seen approaches infinity. As you can see in the left of my photo, each of the two mirrors that I strategically placed next to my bathroom mirror produces an image due to the singles reflection of light off one of the mirror faces to my eye. The remaining images are produced as a result of multiple reflections of light off more than one of the mirror faces. My image gets smaller and smaller in the mirror on the left because each time it is reflected back the image is used as the object. My first reflected image becomes the object to produce the second reflected image and so on, decreasing the size of the image each time it is reflected.