law of refraction

American  

noun

1. the principle that for a ray, radar pulse, or the like, that is incident on the interface of two media, the ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence to the sine of the angle of refraction is equal to the ratio of the velocity of the ray in the first medium to the velocity in the second medium and the incident ray, refracted ray, and normal to the surface at the point of incidence all lie in the same plane.

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Example Sentences

Buffon could, if he wished, look back to the seventeenth century and identify a whole series of laws that had been discovered during the Scientific Revolution: Stevin’s law of hydrostatics, Galileo’s law of fall, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Snell’s law of refraction, Boyle’s law of gases, Hooke’s law of elasticity, Huygens’ law of the pendulum, Torricelli’s law of flow, Pascal’s law of fluid dynamics, Newton’s laws of motion and law of gravity.

From Literature

Harriot independently discovered what we now call Galileo’s law of fall, and also what we now call Snell’s law of refraction, but he never published.

From Literature

To mention only a portion of Harriot’s work, he discovered Snell’s law of refraction two decades before mathematician Willebrord Snell; formulated laws of motion and falling bodies independently of Galileo and decades before Isaac Newton; produced the first drawing of the Moon through a telescope and made important observations of sunspots, again independently of Galileo; played with binary arithmetic nearly a century before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; and was the first to develop fully symbolic algebra.

From Nature

Certainly this will never be done, no more than light or heat will ever be deduced from the law of refraction.

From Project Gutenberg

Diagram illustrating law of refraction 127 65.

From Project Gutenberg