RECENT STORIES

CDOT alerts on intersection work in Centennial ( YourHub.com )
Around the House: Tune your furnace for winter ( John Ward )
Meadow Point teacher wins $1000 Wal-Mart award ( Cherry Creek School District )
Restoring household sanity with KidsClean ( Andrea Wilbur )
Boot Camp members pump pumpkins at ACC ( John Scarffe )

share a story | more postings »

YourHub.com \\ Centennial \\ Stories \\ Education \\ Teacher News

Prisons

e-mail to a friend | print this | link to this

NEXT › ‹ PREVIOUS

Contributed by: Mike Valdes Bleau on 10/29/2007

(prisms came to mind for now apparent reason)

How prisms work
Light changes speed as it moves from one medium to another (for example, from air into the glass of the prism). This speed-change causes light striking the boundary between two media at an angle to be refracted and enter the new medium at a different angle (Huyghens principle), or to be reflected away from it. The amount of reflected light and the degree of bending of the light's path will depend on the angle that the incident beam of light makes with the surface, and on the ratio between the refractive indices of the two media (Snell's law). The refractive index of a medium varies with the wavelength or color of the light used, a phenomenon known as dispersion, and this causes light of different colors to be refracted differently and to leave the prism at different angles, creating an effect similar to a rainbow. This effect can be used to separate a beam of white light into its constituent spectrum of colors.

In Isaac Newton's time, some believed that prisms created new colors. Newton passed individual colors from one prism's spectrum through a second prism and found the color unchanged, and concluded from this that that these different colors must have already been present in the original light - the prism did not create new colors, but merely separated the colors that were already there. He also used a lens and a second prism to recompose the rainbow back into white light. This experiment has become a classic example of the methodology introduced during the scientific revolution. The results of this experiment dramatically transformed the field of metaphysics, leading to John Locke's primary vs secondary quality distinction.

Prisms are sometimes used for the internal reflection at the surfaces rather than for dispersion. If light inside the prism hits one of the surfaces at a sufficiently steep angle, total internal reflection occurs and all of the light is reflected. This makes a prism a useful substitute for a mirror in some situations

[Report this as objectionable content.]

SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story

Talk Back : submit comments to the story

*Note: you need to log-in to add a comment or rating.

Thank you! Your comment has been updated.

CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Mike Valdes Bleau

centennial , CO

Mike Valdes Bleau has posted 169 stories and 7 comments since joining on 9/11/2007. Mike Valdes Bleau's average story rating is 5.

view profile » view other postings from Mike Valdes Bleau »

SAVE AND SHARE THIS STORY

digg	Google
del.icio.us	Yahoo!
reddit	newsvine

What is this?

STORY RSS FEEDS

All stories

All stories in Centennial

All stories by Mike Valdes Bleau

WANT TO WRITE FOR YOURHUB.COM?

Want to see the stories you write and the photos you shoot featured in the YourHub.com Thursday print section available all over the Front Range and with home subscriptions of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post? All you have to do is register, then post a story or column, start a blog or tell everyone what events are happening in town. We will print the best stories, columns, event listings, photos and blog entries in our print sections.

Loading Ad