The Heavens Declare His Handiwork

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Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
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Transmitted/Refracted Light

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

• “Under what conditions will a photon enter into a secondary media and refract?”  The answer to this question is statistical.  The plot of the reflectivity of at each angle from perpendicular to parallel, with the maximum at perpendicular, minimum reflectivity at the Brewster angle, and higher reflectivity at lower/more parallel angles gives a clear indication of the fact that light is refracted and reflected differently depending on that angle of incidence.  In turn, the mechanism underlying this variation is refraction vs. reflection is as follows:

o The clear/colorless transparent medium (e.g. glass, water, diamond) is one where there are neither bonds nor orbitals which can absorb energies in the visible spectrum.  

o The colored transparent medium (e.g. emerald, ruby, sapphire, water with dye…) all have bonds and/or orbitals that absorb all the visible energy spectrum except the frequency (or frequencies) which create the effect of the color.  

o Colored or clear, the unifying feature of transparent substances is that they do not absorb the visible photons.

o The reason that a transparent medium reflects at some angles, and not at others has to do with how the photonic energy interacts with the visible photons.  

§ The photon will reflect off of almost any highly polished metallic or non-metallic surface at an angle near vertical/normal to the surface.  

§ This implies that it does not matter whether the photon hits a bond which will absorb, or transmit, that if there is little opportunity for the parallel vector to interact with the media, that the acceleration provided by the normal vector will produce a reactive field, and thus produce a reflected photon.

o Once the photon has been captured by the transparent media, and is now transmitting through it, then the rate of polarization, magnetic and electric, inductive and capacitive, is going to be the determinant factor as to how fast the photon transmits through the medium.

o Dispersion: color separation: Why?

§ Note that the amount of reflection is a percentage.   Some photons penetrate and transmit/refract, and others do not penetrate and reflect.  

§ The determinant of reflection vs. refraction is thus one of a statistical percentage.   Each medium has a distribution of angles which display points and surfaces from which a photon can reflect.  Thus, at each angle the percentage of the photons that will strike and reflect will change.  

§ The angle of incidence of the photon as compared to the polarization of the incident photon reveals how the nature of the whole photon interacts with the reflective/refractive surface. At each angle a different cross section of electrons is exposed to the photon, and the photon behaves differently regarding its reflection depending on whether it is horizontally or vertically polarized.  

§ Vertically polarized light (i.e. parallel to the normal of the surface) penetrates the interface 100% at the Brewster angle.  

§ A plot of reflectivity vs. angle of incidence can be seen at: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/polar.html

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