Well today when i was on the tennis court and missing a lot of my volleys, i thought, "hmm, what does I need to do in order for the ball i hit to go where i want it to go." Then it occurred to me that the ball and racket could be thought of as a ray and a mirror. Physics teaches us that the incident angle is equal to the reflected angle when a light ray is shone on a mirror. Therefore if I just placed my racket's face so that the reflected angle would go in the intended direction, then my shots would be more accurate. This also leads us to the topic of refraction and indexes. Using snell's law nsintheta=nsintheta, we can determine the angle of reflection when a ray travels through two mediums that have different indexes of refraction, such as air and water, or air and glass.
No comments:
Post a Comment