Light: Mirrors and Lenses
NoteWhat This Chapter Covers
A shiny spoon can turn your face upside down or shrink it — because its surface is curved. This chapter explores how curved mirrors and lenses bend light to form images of every kind: enlarged, shrunk, upright, inverted. We meet concave and convex mirrors and the images they make, nail down the two laws of reflection, discover how a concave mirror converges sunlight hot enough to burn paper while a convex one spreads light wide, and then do it all again with lenses — the very lenses inside your spectacles, a camera, and your own eye.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- distinguish concave and convex mirrors and describe the images they form;
- state and apply the two laws of reflection (i = r; rays in one plane);
- explain how a concave mirror converges and a convex mirror diverges parallel light;
- distinguish convex and concave lenses and the images they form;
- give real-world uses of curved mirrors and lenses (headlights, side mirrors, spectacles, the eye).