Refrections and Reflactions

Bonjour mes amis. Je m’appelle Jason et c’est mon blog. Congratulations to you if you can figure that out without using google translate. Today, I’m going to talk about optics. Lights, lenses, mirror, and other stuff. Also, this is a science post! I think this might be my first science-related post and it’s about one of the most confusing topics I’ve learned this year. So, without further ado, here’s the first Science post ever on my blog.

First off, we started right at the end of our previous unit and attempted to prove why and how light and sound are waves. For this, my partner and I successfully proved how sound is a wave by talking about speakers and the sound waves emitted and picked up by the ears. Light, however, was a different story. We got pretty stuck on light, and all we were able to come up with was when you shine white light into a prism, it separates into colour beams. Yep. We were in for a looong ride.

Now, let’s talk ‘bout light. We then proceeded to watch a documentary about light and nature and cool stuff like that. Here’s the full video:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6co8oc

This documentary was kind of like an detailed introduction to the unit in a whole and helped us understand the unit.

Alright, now let’s have a little talk about mirrors. You know, The reflects thingys that are shiny. You know, you know… yeah. You’ve got your plane mirrors, your concave mirrors, and convex mirrors. And what better way to show off mirrors than with burning things.

Yep. We went outside, grabbed a cardboard chunk and a large concave mirror, and we burned the absolute heck out of it. Also, we also learnt about a solar furnace in France with enough heat and power to melt birds. Sad, but interesting.

This video, along with the mirror experiment really helped my understanding with mirrors and how powerful they can be if used properly. It also gave me a deathly fear of large, concave mirrors. Also, I showed this to my brother the other day, and now he’s scared of France. I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, but I’m pretty sure he thinks if it can melt a bird, it can melt him.

After that, we watched a documentary about some guy going around the world looking at how the Islamic Golden Age impacted optics in the modern age. This was more about the origins of light, but was still pretty beneficial to watch. You can watch it for yourself right here.

This documentary shed some light on the origins of optics and also really helped us understand optics more. There’s a whole series of these documentaries by the same guy, so if you, my valuable viewer, are still interested about Science in the Islam golden age, you can go have a Golden Age Science marathon.

Some things that I found interesting were that although the Greeks are believed to have founded Optics, most of what we learn today came from a guy named Ibn al-Haytham in a period called the Golden Age Of Science (9th – 14th Century BCE). He pretty much challenged what the Greeks believed about light being emitted from the eyes and proved that light actually enters the eyes. So, when you think about it, he’s one of the real fathers of optics. Also, he wrote a book called the Kitab al-Manazir (The Book Of Optics) in an asylum after an angry Caliph (King) threw him in there after he faked being crazy to escape a promise he couldn’t keep. He was a pretty interesting guy, to say the least.

One of his most famous experiments was called the Camera Obscura, which was basically a pinhole camera. How it works is if you take a window with a view, black it and the entire room out, poke a hole in the window covering, and put some sort of screen behind it, the image will be perfectly reflected onto the screen, although it will be inverted. This experiment is also where the modern word camera comes from, as the Camera Obscura process is pretty much in everything that uses light, form modern photography to even sight. Here’s a diagram:

Of course, this is all in the video, so if you felt that I’m bad at explaining, or want to know how the Camera Obscura works, go check out the video above.

We didn’t really do much homework after that. We just listened to some lectures and did a couple of labs. My first lab was pretty basic. It was about mirrors and I worked on it with a certain Mr. Kyle Dandar. In this lab, we worked on some basic mirror stuff. We used a ray box and an optics kit and shined (shone?) light rays at different mirrors and marked down the incident rays and the reflected rays, which are the light rays shone at the mirror, and the ones reflecting off of the mirror. Pretty basic stuff, though still important. This pretty much acted as some of the foundation for the rest of our unit.

Ok. Now, onto the work that we did in school. We started by learning about Ray Diagrams.

A ray diagram is a diagram that shows rays. More specifically, the paths of rays that are shown at different mirrors and lenses. Also, the things you need to write down about a ray diagram follow one of the catchiest acronyms I’ve known in my life. Size, Attitude, Location, Type. SALT. Here are a few examples:

This was one of the biggest challenges I faced in this unit. And, even though I did not understand this at all,  and in all my panic, I forgot that there was a teacher in the room that knows more that I ever will, so, I was forced to go solo for most of this stuff.

Anyways, then we did our second lab, The BFLL (Big Fat Lenses Lab) which I did with Izzy. This one was about lenses and rays and cool stuff like that, as you can tell from the title. We looked at bi-concave and bi-convex lenses, and also how light behaves after being shown (shined? shone?) through different liquids (Water, Vegetable Oil, and Ethanol) and why we thought different liquids had different brightnesses of light rays. Here. Look at a few images.

For comparison, this lab was wayyyyyyy more extensive than the mirror one, but this one was also kore challenging, and therefore, I learned more knowledge. And, as we all know, knowledge is power.

Now onto our test. That’s right, no final project like in humanities, just a test to cap off our unit. And, I’m not going to lie, I did have to study quite a bit to do good on this test. Also, I had a ton of opportunities to get more practice in class with all the extra worksheets, and, like the overconfident naive child’s I am, I passed them up thinking I had my optics down mat. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to realize that it’s still optics and I knew nothing about optics. So, I studied. It was pretty hard having passed up all my opportunities, but I managed to get it done and wound up with a pretty good 21/23.

And that caps off my 1st ever science post. Wow. I’m just realizing that it’s over 1200 words. Good job to you for reading all of this. There might be more before the end of the school year, there might not. Be on the lookout for my next post about the wonders of exploration. And with that, I will leave you.

Wait, Wait, Wait, before I finish this post, I want you all to know, before you bombard me in the comment section, I know there’s a typo in my title. It’s intensional. I wanted to see how many people would actually notice it, well, now it’s not much of a secret anymore. Anyways, now, with that, I’ll really (finally) leave you.