Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Term 3 General reflections
I feel that this topic, in term 3, is more of a visual topic, which requires accuracy and patience when drawing the diagram since we can only have a mistake of +/- 1. I feel that this topic requires lesser memorization, with simple ones like plane mirror always produced virtual images and is challenging in the way that we need to observe things more carefully and imagine what is happening. When I learnt about refraction, I thought that it was quite easy since it just means that light travels at different speed at different corners, thus causing the slight change of the angle of the light. But when I learnt about critical angle and total internal reflection, I was quite confused at first but finally “saw the light” when my science teacher taught about it. It is really amazing to know how light can be reflection with a small portion of light loss and it can be used for many things, like the internet, etc. Convex and concave glass are also very difficult and requires some memorization and I feel that this is where the visual part comes in when you need to find the tangent of the line and see whether it is real or virtual. In conclusion, I feel that term 3’s topic is not as tough as other terms, but also not as interesting.
This is a convex lens.
This is a concave lens.
Images from: www.google.com/images