 | When light encounters a boundary between two materials, such as between air and glass, the light can be reflected, refracted, or both.
In this chapter, you will learn how refraction bends light rays as they pass from one medium to another.
How much the light is bent is determined by the index of refraction for each of the two materials.
The physics of refraction explains how lenses create images and how prisms disperse light. Refraction varies with color and this variation is the explanation for the dispersion of light by a prism (or water droplets) into a rainbow. Lenses appear in a wide variety of devices, from telescopes and microscopes to cameras, and occur naturally in the eyes of living creatures.
|  | | By the end of this chapter you should be able to
|  | describe refraction and provide examples of it in real life;
| | define the index of refraction;
| | calculate the angle of refraction at a boundary;
| | describe why internal reflection occurs;
| | calculate the critical angle at a boundary;
| | characterize different lenses based on their image properties;
| | use ray tracing to locate the image created by a convex lens;
| | calculate image distance and magnification for a convex lens; and
| | explain how compound optical devices, such as the telescope and microscope, work.
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|  | 21A: Refraction of light
21B: Creating real and virtual images with lenses
21C: Ray tracing, focal length, and magnification of a convex lens
21D: Build a microscope and a telescope
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