Mirror paper. Fun physical experience at home

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Mirror paper. Physical experiments

Entertaining experiments in physics

Entertaining experiences at home / Physics experiments for children

Paper comes in different grades and is distinguished by its smoothness. But even very smooth paper cannot reflect like a mirror; it does not look like a mirror at all. If you look at such smooth paper through a magnifying glass, you can immediately see its fibrous structure, make out depressions and tubercles on its surface. Light falling on paper is reflected by both tubercles and depressions. This randomness of reflections creates scattered light.

However, paper can also be made to reflect light rays in a different way so that no scattered light is obtained. True, even very smooth paper is far from being a real mirror, but still, some mirroring can be achieved from it.

Take a sheet of very smooth paper and, leaning its edge against the bridge of your nose, turn to the window (this experiment should be done on a bright, sunny day). Your gaze should slide over the paper. You will see on it a very pale reflection of the sky, vague silhouettes of trees, houses. And the smaller the angle between the direction of view and the sheet of paper, the clearer the reflection will be. Similarly, you can get a mirror image of a candle or a light bulb on paper.

Paper specularity

How to explain that on paper, although bad, you can still see the reflection? When you look along the sheet, all the tubercles of the paper surface block the depressions and turn into one continuous surface, as it were. We no longer see the disordered rays from the depressions, they now do not prevent us from seeing what the tubercles reflect.

Author: Rabiza F.V.

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