This means that as a light beam enters water or glass, the light bends. You know this from the spoon-in-a-glass trick: if you put a spoon in a glass of water, you notice that the handle of the spoon makes an abrupt “break” at the water/air interface. The same happens as light enters a piece of ice: it will bend.

This bending of light, called refraction, causes the straw to look broken​1​. The portion of the straw that is submerged in water also appears to be wider than the portion of the straw above the water.

A spoon half-immersed in a glass of water appears bent at the surface of the water. We know that this is due to refraction of light, which bends the rays of light at the surface, so that the retinal image of the spoon is illusorily bent.

The part of the spoon inside water appears to be bent relative to the part that is above water due to refraction of light. The light rays from the spoon (or any object in water) in water bend away from the normal as they pass from the water into the air. This makes the spoon appear to be displaced at the interface.

The fork will gets bigger under the water that’s why you might see like it was broken but it’s not. It is because of the rays of the light that move into the air, they change speed and bend causing the spoon to look broken.

Above the water, the light reflects from the straw through the air and glass to your eyes. But below, when the light also travels through water, the refraction causes the image of the straw to be in a slightly different location. To the brain, the straw appears broken (and bloated).

If you shine a beam of light (a bundle of parallel rays) through the air, it will travel in a straight line. When a ray passes from air into glass the direction in which the light ray is travelling changes. The light ray appears to bend as it as it passes through the surface of the glass.

An object seen in the water will usually appear to be at a different depth than it actually is, due to the refraction of light rays as they travel from the water into the air. If the angle of the beam is increased even farther, the light will refract with increasing proportion to the entry angle.

There is no doubt that objects are optically magnified: the refractive index of water is 4/3 that of air, and light rays are bent away from the normal on entering air from water. For close objects viewed through a diver’s facemask, the optical effects are slightly less owing to the air space in the mask.

While wearing a flat scuba mask or goggles, objects underwater will appear 33% bigger (34% bigger in salt water) and 25% closer than they actually are. Also pincushion distortion and lateral chromatic aberration are noticeable.

The surface of a water drop curves outward to make a dome. This outward, or convex, curvature bends light rays inward. The result is an enlarged image on the retina of your eye. The object appears bigger than it is.

The surface tension of water causes the molecules to create a rounded surface on the water drop. The water drop works as a magnifying glass by refracting light. A magnifying glass is a single convex (curved outward) lens that is used to produce a larger image of an object.

Look at how the newspaper print appears under the “water lens.” What if you lift the plastic away from the paper and move your lens nearer or further from the print What other cunning 4. The surface of a smaller drop is even more curved, creating a bigger change in direction of the light ray.

For refraction to occur substances must be transparent and light ray must pass from region of one index of refraction to another i.e. both substances should have different refractive indices should and the light ray must impinge at an angle other than normal which must not be less than the critical angle.

Wave speed, frequency and wavelength in refraction Although the wave slows down, its frequency remains the same, due to the fact that its wavelength is shorter. When waves travel from one medium to another the frequency never changes.

Refraction is the “bending” of light (or any electromagnetic wave) when entering a different medium. When electromagnetic waves enter a different medium the speed changes. The frequency stays the same, so the wavelength must change.

Frequency of light does not ever change, as long as you can be sure that the photons are the same as the photons at the beginning. So, in passing from one material to another, light changes wavelength proportionally to the change of speed, so that the ratio v/L=f remains constant.

Frequency. The frequencies of IR waves are less than the frequencies of visible light.

Visible light has a wavelength that ranges from 380 nm – 750 nm on the electromagnetic spectrum while infrared light is just beyond it, ranging from 700 nm – 1 mm, the start of the non-visible portion of the spectrum. As a result, infrared cannot be seen except with special equipment like a security camera.