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originally posted by: lonegurkha
Both your links return a message of under construction. Now isn't that interesting. Good thing you got the screen shots.
www76.zippyshare.com...
www37.zippyshare.com...
originally posted by: Vroomfondel
My grandfather was a physicist involved with the Manhattan project. I know...this is where people start yelling, "Bull#"... Its ok, I am used to it and ignore it quite handily.
He was one of those guys that cracked jokes only Einstein would laugh at. When I saw this thread it reminded me of something he used to say quite frequently. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line - or in our case, two straight lines." Then he would snicker and look like he was waiting for an answer that never came. He would just smile and continue on with whatever he was doing. I am sure it is just coincidence but it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread.
I asked him what he meant on more than one occasion and his response was the same every single time. He would tap me on the side of my head and say, "Don't ask me, look in here - then tell me when you find it."
I hope to figure that out some day...
Suppose a light ray starts at point A, in air, and ends at point B, in a block of glass. Now, we know that glass has a refractive index. This means that the speed of light in the glass is lower than that in air. The light doesn't travel in a straight line between A and B, but rather in two straight line segments – in a straight line from point A to point C on the surface of the glass, then in a straight line from point C to point B. Where is point C? It turns out that it’s such that the total time the ray takes from A to B is minimized. Clever or what? How does it ‘know’ that this is the shortest path?