lasers

[andrew]

can you not reflect a laser of a light absorbing object

[deleted-2574]

Hi Andrew!

Rephrasing slightly, providing "Can you reflect a laser off a light absorbing object?" to answers. com provides a several web resources, including:

"How Things Work - How Things Work Home Page" that looks very promising.

Let us know if you have further questions.

[EDS]

Hope you don't mind my stepping in with yet another suggestion.

Some alternative questions might be, "what makes some materials more reflective than others?" Or, "what happens when a surface absorbs light?"

Whether you're talking about a laser, a light bulb, or the sun, the phenomena will be largely the same.

There are some special cases where the fact that the laser beam includes light of only a single frequency is important, but for reflection from ordinary surfaces, the only thing that makes a laser different from the others is that it's really bright.

[deleted-71360]

Keep it simple. Everything reflects, either a little or a lot.

White paper is 80 to 95 percent. Black paper is 5 to 15 percent. Colored paper reflects each color a different amount.

Take a magnifying glass and shine sunlight onto black paper and you still get a blindingly bright dot, and then it catches fire.

It is not a matter of whether something reflects light, only a matter of how much.

Robert Reavis

[aznnerd666]

Hey

Like robertreavis said, everything reflects light.

The only thing that absorbs light is something that is purely black, like a black hole kind of black. Believe me, you will not find anything within a lightyear that does not reflect at least a bit of light.

aznnerd666