Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

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

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.

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.

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 wrote:]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.

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]