Mirror photography & video

[Dean Mullen]

If you can project light beams against mirrors and it can in some sense keep the light beam lasting longer, what if you have a circular machine containing countless mirrors and that you project the light of an object for e.g. onto a mirror then close the machine from the outside world fast enough so that the light does not escape and is kept on an infinite loop of mirrors thus the light of the from can be kept as clear as the room itself even after the room is gone, and that if you opened it up and observed it for a split second you see the room through the mirror and would see a more than crystal clear image of the room as if it was still there and it would look so real it would be more realastic looking than any camera or video technology we attain, and if we could somehow use this concept to hold onto light for long enough we could create photos & videos of recorded events that look so real we cannot distinguishe it from reality, although it seems impossible if it could be done we could open up a completely new world of recording light.

 

And we could also mix light togehter and create special effects that look as real as reality itself, so you could get to observe completely fictional videos create by mixing the light attained from certain objects, so if you done so you could amazingly create videos & images more real than any technology before.

 

It may be difficult if not impossible to do this but it would be interesting to try.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

As I recall from my waves and optics course, you can get about 93% efficiency in a mirror -- that is, it'll reflect only 93% of the light hitting it. That can perhaps be improved a bit, but even with 95% efficiency, after fourteen bounces or so you've lost half your light.

[Dean Mullen]

As I recall from my waves and optics course, you can get about 93% efficiency in a mirror -- that is, it'll reflect only 93% of the light hitting it. That can perhaps be improved a bit, but even with 95% efficiency, after fourteen bounces or so you've lost half your light.

 

I see but where does the light go when you say it is lost? and even if it is lost there maybe some mechanism to harness it still.

[swansont]

As I recall from my waves and optics course, you can get about 93% efficiency in a mirror -- that is, it'll reflect only 93% of the light hitting it. That can perhaps be improved a bit, but even with 95% efficiency, after fourteen bounces or so you've lost half your light.

 

With proper dielectric coatings you can get >99% for specific wavelengths — you all but eliminate transmission and the resulting absorption by having destructive interference in the coating layers, which gives you constructive interference for reflection — and make really high-finesse cavities.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror

 

I see but where does the light go when you say it is lost? and even if it is lost there maybe some mechanism to harness it still.

 

It's lost to absorption in the mirror material. Entropy wins.

[John Cuthber]

Using a dielectric mirror gives you a monochrome image which isn't very impressive.

With a 95% reflector you can get away with 15 bounces before you lose half the image intensity.

If you put one mirror on the moon and the other on Earth that's less than a minute.

A video recorder does a better job.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

With 99.99% efficiency you get 7,000 bounces. If the mirrors are on the Earth and Moon, that's just a few days, and that's ignoring atmospheric scattering and diffraction, which will spread your light beam out and make you lose most of it.