SCIENCE: REFRACTION 🌈

Ever noticed how a drinking straw seems to bend in two when it's viewed in a glass filled with water? This is because of refraction.
Refraction occurs because light change speed and direction when it moves from one medium into another. 
Medium is the word used by scientists to describe a substance that light will travel through. A medium can be a solid, liquid, or a gas.
The straw appears bent because the light travels faster through air that through the liquid. Because it slows down as it enters the liquid, the light bends towards normal. 

AIM: To investigate how light is affected by changing the substance it is travelling through. 
EQUIPMENT: Ray box, power source, glass or perspex block, single slit ray slide.
METHOD:

1. Place the glass box in the correct area.
2. Place your ray box at the top of the page and shine the beam so it travels along the 10 degree line to the centre of the protractor (this is your angle of incidence). 
3. Read the angle the light leaves the glass block at (this is your angle of refraction).
4. Continue the investigation so you can complete the table opposite.

HYPOTHESIS: I think the light will bend in an upwards direction when travelling through glass.

RESULTS: 

When the rays of light transmitted travelled through air to pass into the medium (the glass) it slowed down and bent inwards in a forward direction. When it exited the glass block it speeds up and bends outwards.

There are varying result for different shapes and types of mediums. When light is shined through different mediums it acts in different ways - it could speed up, slow down, bend outward and inward, etc, etc, and in this experiment we observed what would happen through glass blocks. 

This is called refraction: it is a phenomenon that occurs when light passes through different mediums to change speed and direction in the process.