Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

can you not reflect a laser of a light absorbing object

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.

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.

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

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