I NEED HELP!! plz!

[KiNgToMaTo]

I dont understand snell's law from the project Using a laser to measure the speed of light in jello, is there a simple calculation that you can do on a calculator, or another way?? thnx

[Craig_Bridge]

I dont understand snell's law from the project Using a laser to measure the speed of light in jello, is there a simple calculation that you can do on a calculator, or another way??

Avoiding what you don't understand isn't very scientific. Have you put "Snell's Law" into a search engine? One of the first things found when I tried it was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snell's_law

The bad thing about the wikipedia is that it uses lots of big words. The good thing is that it hyperlinks them to definitions.

Try doing a little reading and see if you can figure it out or at least formulate a specific question and post back.

[Craig_Bridge]

I also forgot to ask whether you had looked up any of the bibliography articles in https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... ?from=Home
Some of these do a pretty good job of illustrating Snell's Law.

I also forgot to ask what grade you are in. If you haven't been exposed to some Trigonometry, then you will probably have a bit of trouble understanding the "Sin" function immediately. The Sin function isn't hard to understand once you realize that it is simply a ratio of the length of the opposite side to the length of the hypotenuse for a right triangle with a given angle.

[davidkallman]

Hi KiNgToMaTo,

The website:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... fr.html#c3

does the calculations for you. You need to click on the values in red, under Snell's law. This site also has definitions of the relevant terms.

[davidkallman]

]The website:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... fr.html#c3

does the calculations for you.

that I mentioned is on in the main Science Buddies page for this project:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... p009.shtml

I forgot to mention how I found the hyperphysics page. The Science Buddies page has additional resources.

[sam b yar]

for one thing it is not possible to go the speed of light. second of all were are you going to get the laser.[/list]