Comment on Speediest little fella.
metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub 10 months agoI thought photons are always moving in straight lines from their perspective, and it’s space that’s bent. Unless it’s through a medium, then they just get absorbed and re-emitted, sort of.
Entropius@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Space bending is a general relativity thing, which isn’t really related much to how mirrors work.
Regarding the medium but, photons being absorbed and remitted can’t explain how light moves slower in glass. This is just an extremely popular myth. Photons are only absorbed by atoms at very specific frequencies. Also, the entire reason glass is transparent to begin with is that it’s not absorbing the photons (requires too much energy to bump the electron’s energy level the photon to photon isn’t absorbed and it keeps on trucking). Also photon absorption and remission is stochastic so there’s no way to control the direction it happens in or how quickly it happens. Random directions of remitted light would make glass translucent, not transparent. So for a few reasons, that’s not how it works.