Mirrors
A Child's Physics uses two basic mirrors, flat and parabolic. You can get mirrors that create all sorts of distortions which are fun and silly but they obscure the point. Either the mirror gives a true flat bounce in which the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection or the mirror reflects Light (or Sound for that matter) to a particular focal point.
Bouncing the laser off the flat mirror and hitting a target is great fun and quite a challenge. It is also the concrete experience of Light behaving like an object, a ping pong ball for instance, which is what a philosopher might call a discreet entity and a scientist would call a particle.
The parabolic mirror shows that light does not return in a straight line from a curved surface. It is also used to define the focal point both by crossed beams and flipped image.
Bouncing the laser off the flat mirror and hitting a target is great fun and quite a challenge. It is also the concrete experience of Light behaving like an object, a ping pong ball for instance, which is what a philosopher might call a discreet entity and a scientist would call a particle.
The parabolic mirror shows that light does not return in a straight line from a curved surface. It is also used to define the focal point both by crossed beams and flipped image.
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