Infinite mirrors are a fun party trick, but the physics behind this phenomenon explains why it may not be true. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s ...

When people look into a mirror, they see an image of themselves behind the glass. That image results from light rays encountering the shiny surface and bouncing back, or reflecting, providing a ...

For more than half a century, the idea that light or radio waves could suddenly reverse in time sounded like a thought experiment, not a laboratory result. Now, a series of meticulous experiments has ...

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light ...

Go find a makeup mirror. There's a good chance you have one in the bathroom. You know the type—it has a surface that shows you a zoomed-in image of your face. If you have one nearby, you can use this ...

Physicists have finally confirmed a phenomenon that sounds like pure science fiction: waves that appear to bounce off a ...

Two separate teams of scientists have built the thinnest mirrors in the world: sheets of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), each just a single atom wide. The mirrors were developed at the same time at ...

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery has led ...

Kin Fai Mak is in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics and the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. Jie Shan is in the Laboratory of ...

Although plasmas are generally considered as unstable and hardly controllable media, during an ultrashort laser pulse—typically below 100 fs—this plasma only expands by a small fraction of the light ...