Glass and Mirror | BYJU'S Now We Know

Glass is normally transparent but if the same glass is used in a mirror it no longer remains transparent and one can see extremely bright and clear images. What makes glass so different from mirrors? Most of the light rays simply pass through glass hence it is transparent, and the image doesn’t form but if some opaque object is placed behind the glass then it will prevent light from passing through, and the image might get formed. but it will be mostly dark and unclear. That’s because in the case of opaque objects like wooden board, generally, most of the light rays either get absorbed or penetrate through the atomic gaps and dissipate. So, the overall amount of light reflected from the surface is quite less. As a result, the image formed is dark and unclear. So to make a mirror, we need something that can uniformly reflect most of the light falling onto it. And that is metals. Metals have a sea of freely-moving electrons throughout them and light rays incident on the metal immediately encounter this freely-moving sea of electrons at the surface and bounce off or get reflected by them. This continuous encounter with fast-moving surface electrons hardly allows light to penetrate beneath the surface of the metals and dissipate. Like other objects, metals also absorb some of the light, but these light rays are mainly absorbed by the fast-moving electrons present at the surface. These electrons instantly re-emit the absorbed light, and that also contributes to light coming off from the surface. This way, metals either reflect or re-emit most of the incident light from their surfaces. And that’s why metals are so shiny or lustrous. This also makes them great reflectors of light, which is exactly what we needed in mirrors. Glass coated with metals like silver or aluminium at the back reflects more than 90% of the incident light and enables the formation of bright and extremely clear images. #BYJUS #NowWeKnow #BYJUSNowweKnow #BYJUSNowweknowShorts #Glass #Mirror #GlassVsMirror #Ytshorts #shorts #youtubeshorts