Exploratorium: Science Snacks: Light Snacks

Snack name	Description
Afterimage	A flash of light prints a lingering image in your eye.
Anti-Gravity Mirror	It's all done with mirrors!
Benham's Disk	A rotating black-and-white disk produces the illusion of color.
Bird in the Cage	Stare at a color and see it change.
Blue Sky	Now you can explain why the sky is blue and the sunset is red.
Bone Stress	Polarized light reveals stress patterns in clear plastic
Bridge Light	A thin layer of air trapped between two pieces of Plexiglas™ produces rainbow-colored interference patterns.
Bronx Cheer Bulb	Some lightbulbs appear to wiggle and flash when you give them the raspberry, but the only thing wiggling is you.
Bubble Suspension	Soap bubbles float on a cushion of carbon dioxide gas.
Bubble Tray	Create giant bubbles.
Colored Shadows	Shadows are not all black and white.
Convection Currents	Make your own heat waves in an aquarium.
Corner Reflector	See yourself as others see you.
Critical Angle	Why your phone calls don't leak out of optical fibers.
Cylindrical Mirror	This cylindrical mirror lets you see yourself as others see you.
Diffraction	Light can bend around edges.
Disappearing Glass Rods	You can make glass objects disappear.
Everyone Is You and Me	See yourself become someone else.
Giant Lens	A lens creates an image that hangs in midair.
Give and Take	Dark-colored materials both absorb and emit energy more readily than light-colored materials.
Glue Stick Sunset	The scattering of light by the atmosphere, which creates the blue sky and red sunsets, can be modeled when light from a flashlight shines through clear glue sticks.
Gray Step	Without a boundary, it's hard to distinguish different shades of gray.
Hot Spot	You can focus the invisible light from an electric heater.
Inverse Square Law	Why the world gets dark so fast outside the circle of the campfire.
Laser Jello	Use gelatin as a smoked lens, to view total internal reflection, and as a color filter.
Look Into Infinity	Images of images of images can repeat forever.
Magic Wand	See pictures in thin air.
Mirrorly a Window	What you see is often affected by what you expect to see.
Moire Patterns	When you overlap materials with repetitive lines, you create moire patterns.
Parabolas	It's all done with mirrors.
Pinhole Magnifier	Who needs expensive optical equipment?
Polarized Light Mosaic	With polarized light, you can make a stained glass window without glass.
Polarized Sunglasses	If you rotate a pair of polarizing sunglasses, you will find that they cut road glare much better in some positions than in others.
Pupil	Your pupil changes size to control how much light enters your eye.
Real Image	Create the image of an object in space using a $2 ornament.
Rotating Light	Polarized light passing through sugar, water "rotates" to reveal beautiful colors.
Seeing Your Blind Spot	See your blind spot.
Seeing Your Retina	You can use a dim point of light to cast a shadow of the blood supply of your retina onto the retina itself. This will allow you to see the blood supply of your retina, and even your blind spot.
Soap Bubbles	Create geometric art with soap films.
Solar Brightness	A photometer made by making a grease spot on white paper can be used to compare the brightness of the sun to the brightness of a lamp. By finding a position at which the sun is as bright as the lamp the power output of the sun can be estimated.
Spectra	Fingerprints for light sources.
Spherical Reflections	Discover art and science in a myriad of spherical reflections
Touch the Spring	You can see the spring, but you can't touch it.
Water Sphere Lens	Make a lens and a magnifying glass by filling a bowl with water.