Ray diagrams are useful tools for determining the location of an image as produced by a concave mirror. Of all the rays which emanate from the top of the object arrow and are incident to the mirror, there are two rays whose behavior at...

A tutorial which demonstrates how ray diagrams can be used to determine what portion of a plane mirror must be used in order to view an image.

An introduction to the human eye as it relates to the physics ray model of light and image formation.

Discover how light reacts when it strikes mirrors which are placed at right angles to each other.

Students explore this simple physics principle: In order to view an object, you must sight along a line at that object; and when you do light will come from that object to your eye along the line of sight.

Through illustrated diagrams and animations, students explore the broken pencil phenomenon and light refraction.

Students explore three different ray diagrams for objects positioned at different locations along the principal axis in a convex mirror.

While a ray diagram may help one determine the approximate location and size of the image, it will not provide numerical information about image distance and image size. To obtain this, students are introduced to the Mirror Equation and...

A physics tutorial focused on the behavior of light as it relates to concave mirrors.

In this physics tutorial, we will follow a pattern of inquiry for convex mirrors: investigating how convex mirrors reflect light and produce images.

This page is a continuation of a tutorial about light reflection and refraction. It contains a diagram and suggestions on how to derive Snell's Law, which governs the refraction of light in a medium. For background to this derivation,...

Students create and decorate their own spectrographs using simple materials and holographic diffraction gratings. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual components of light. After building the...

The universe produces a broad range of light, only a fraction of which is visible to our eyes. Gamma rays are nonvisible light, which also includes x-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared radiation, and radio waves.

This page and the three pages which follow discuss how X-ray technology can be used to produce an image of the human body. Discussion is understandable and highly intriguing. Several interactive animations allow the visitor to explore...

Using a student-teacher dialogue format, this page discusses the nature of light as an electromagnetic wave and the electromagnetic spectrum.

This physics department site provides links about the diffraction of light. Each page includes thorough explanations and meaningful graphics. Some pages include interactive problem-solving practice sections.

You already know that a trip to the beach can give you a nasty sunburn, but the nitty gritty of sun safety is actually much more complex. Wrinkle-causing UVA rays and burn-inducing UVB's can pose a serious risk to your health (and good...

This physics department site explains how prisms work and their purpose in the dispersion of light. Explains the angle of deviation and includes an interactive form in which visitors calculate the angle of deviation and receive immediate...

Through illustrated examples and animated tutorials, students discover what causes refraction.

In this interactive physics tutorial, students will learn about a mathematical equation relating these two angles and the indices of refraction of the two materials on each side of the boundary.

Through illustrated examples and interactive practice problems, students explore the details of Snell's Law.

Illustrated examples and interactive practice problems that introduce students to the concept of the critical angle, the angle of incidence that provides an angle of refraction of 90-degrees.

Students use this tutorial to investigate the refractive ability of converging and diverging lenses.

The purpose of this tutorial is to summarize object-image relationships by dividing the possible object locations into five general areas or points.