High School Understanding Reflection in Light: Electromagnetic Interactions with Matter

[_PJ_]

If light encounters -normal- matter, the electromagnetic aspects of the influence of the electrons will be interacted with (I'm ignoring any stress contributuins to gravity) which is (scattering matrix?) either nothing at all (translucency) due to quantisation, or absorbtion.

Is this correct?

If so, how is it that light be reflected?

 

[Nugatory]

If so, how is it that light be reflected?

You might want to give Feynman's book "QED: the strange theory of light and matter" a try.

 

[_PJ_]

Yrs i have that book, unfortunately, it's in storage, and I've not seen an english-language version here. Sadly I am unable to memorise entire chapters I had read over ten years ago.

 

[_PJ_]

I do recall passages and diagrams concerning internal reflections and the phase-changes as result but the details are fuzzy now. Also, I seem to recall diagrams where light was an oscillating line and matter had a ' surface' marked by a continuous, thin line...

I am unconvinced that matter is composed of space thus bounded.