IndexWhat is light?How does light behave?Where does light come from?Works cited:What is light?Light arrives on our planet after a quick journey from the Sun, 149 million km (93 million miles away). Light travels at 300,000 km per second, so the light you see now was still hidden in the Sun about eight minutes ago. But why does light make this journey? As you probably know, the Sun is a nuclear fireball that emits energy in all directions. The light we see is simply the only part of the energy produced by the Sun that our eyes can detect. When light travels between two places (from the Sun to the Earth or from a flashlight to the sidewalk in front of you on a dark night), energy takes a trip between these two points. The energy travels in the form of waves (similar to sea waves but about 100 million times smaller), a vibrating pattern of electricity and magnetism that we call electromagnetic energy. If our eyes could see electricity and magnetism, we could see each ray of light as a wave of electricity vibrating in one direction and a wave of magnetism vibrating at right angles to it. These two waves will travel at the speed of light. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay How does light behave? Light waves behave in four particularly interesting and useful ways that we describe as reflection, refraction, diffraction, and interference. The only reason we can see things around us is that light, whether from the Sun or something like an electric lamp here on Earth, reflects them into our eyes. If you turn off the light source or prevent it from reaching your eyes, those objects will disappear. They don't cease to exist, but you can no longer see them. Reflection can happen in two quite different ways. If you have a smooth, very shiny surface and you hit it with a narrow beam of light, you will get a narrow beam of light reflected off it. This is called specular reflection and it's what happens if you point a flashlight or laser at a mirror: you get a well-defined beam of light bouncing back at you. Most objects are not smooth and polished - they are rather rough. So when you shine light on them, it gets scattered everywhere. This is called diffuse reflection and is how we see most objects around us as they scatter the light that hits them. Have you noticed how your body slows down when you try to walk in water? You run along the beach at full speed but, as soon as you touch the sea, you immediately slow down. No matter how hard you try, you can't run as fast in water as in air. Thick liquid is harder to push away, so it slows you down. Exactly the same thing happens to light if you shine it into water, glass, plastic, or another denser material: it slows down quite dramatically. This tends to cause light waves to bend, something we usually call refraction. The light will spread identically if you shine it onto a small aperture roughly similar in size to its wavelength. You may have noticed this effect, which is called diffraction, if you squint and look at a streetlight in the dark. When your eyes close, the light seems to spread in strange streaks as it creeps into the narrow spaces between your eyelids and eyelashes. The more you close your eyes, the more the light spreads (until it disappears when you close your eyes completely). If you stand over a calm pond and dip your finger, you will see ripples of energy spreading outward from the point of impact. If you do this in two different places, the two sets of ripples will move towards each other, collide and form a.