We learned that light bends when entering and exiting different mediums, and in the process some light gets reflected. To learn about refraction, we watched a video showing a laser light going straight until a glass prism is moved in front of it. The light bends on entry into the prism, and again on exit. At the two points where the refraction takes place, reflection also takes place. When we put half of a ruler in water, the ruler looked bent.
We learned about the particle and wave properties of light due to Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens (pronounced Harkens). Isaac thought light was made of particles, while Christiaan thought light was made of waves. Newton’s theory was called corpuscular theory (corpuscular is now known as photon) and Huygens’s idea was called luminferous ether. Both Newton and Huygens used an analogy to support their theories. Newton compared light with a bouncy ball and Huygens compared light with the ripples caused when you throw an object into water. To demonstrate what the two scientists were thinking, we did two experiments. Our experiment used a long bowl filled with water and a weight in the middle. When a water droplet fell into the water, it rippled and split into two waves after contact with the weight. This supports wave theory as demonstrated in the next experiment. We used a projector as a light source and we had a laptop at varying distances from the projector. The shadow was crisp when the laptop was far, and was enlarged and blurry when close. The two waves cause the shadow to be blurry in the laptop experiment. The blurry effect is more when the laptop is closer to the light source. The laptop is like the weight in the first experiment. I think Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton are right because if you shine a light at a far wall, it shows an enlarged circle but dull. If light were particles, the shadow would be the same size as if up close and crisp. However, when light reflects, it supports the particle theory.
It is important to know how refraction works because it is used in many applications. Examples are optical systems like cameras, microscopes, telescopes, binoculars, glasses and other objects with lenses.
It was hard to learn the Particle Light Model because there was supporting evidence that light could either be waves or particles. There was also evidence disproving some. Without a teacher guiding us, it would have taken a longer time to figure it out for ourselves.
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