Snell's law

Uncommon card · No. 81516

Snell's law (also known as the Snell–Descartes law, and the law of refraction) is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air. In optics, the law is used in ray tracing to compute the angles of transmission or refraction, and in experimental optics to find the refractive index of a material. The law is also satisfied in meta-materials, which allow light to be bent "backward" at a negative angle of refraction with a negative refractive index. The law states that, for a given pair of media, the ratio of the sines of angle of incidence ( θ 1 ) {\displaystyle \left(\theta _{1}\right)} and angle of refraction (...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Oleg Alexandrov — I just tweaked the original, Public domain