Reflections...

Its a nice way to view the world around you in a rather amusing scientific way. After all we have only one world! Laets make the living here fun and really happy !!

Have you ever looked at a mirror? How does a mirror work? Surely, you might begin to say of reflection and all sorts of things. But how does then reflection work? There should be a law governing the reflection. No, not Snell's law. It just gives the relation between angles involved in reflection and incidence.

Now, this is exactly how reflection works. Suppose an Electromagnetic wave hits the surface of a silver coated mirror. Now, from the previous post, you will have an idea of how electromagnetic waves propogate. Ofcourse they propogate in the direction of E x H. Now, suppose this is being incident on our silver coated piece.

The principle behind electromagnetic shielding is the fact that electromagnetic waves disappear inside a conductor. How does this happen? Well, in a conductor, the fields vanish. So there is no E X H for the EM wave to propagate. But, by the theory of Energy Conservation, this energy is somehow to be maintained. What does it do ?

The incident wave reflects! Thus, better the conduction of the medium of the mirror, better the reflection and hence higher the quality of the mirror. There a lot of other factors affecting reflection including smoothness, thickness etc.