Interactive Lab · NCERT Science 086

Refraction Lab

Bend light with your own hands. Change the angle and the glass, and watch Snell's law hold every single time — then push past the critical angle and trigger Total Internal Reflection.

What is this?

A live optics bench. A ray of light hits the boundary between two materials (like air and glass). You control the angle it arrives at and how strongly the glass bends light (its refractive index), and the diagram updates instantly.

How to use it

Drag the Angle of incidence slider.
Drag the Refractive index slider (water ≈ 1.33, glass ≈ 1.5, diamond ≈ 2.42).
Toggle the direction: Air → Glass, or Glass → Air.
Read the live values and the Snell's-law check below the diagram.

What you'll learn

Light bends toward the normal entering a denser medium, away when leaving it.
Snell's law n₁ sin i = n₂ sin r is always satisfied.
What the critical angle is and when Total Internal Reflection happens.

y = light at a boundary

Angle of incidence 40°

Refractive index (n) 1.50

Try:

All numbers shown below the diagram, so the picture stays clean and readable.

Interactive concept inspired by OpenMAIC (THU-MAIC), MIT-licensed. Widget hand-built for trykarkedekho; physics per the NCERT Class 10 syllabus (ncert.nic.in).

← Back to the Light chapter

Buffyyour study buddy

Hi! Watching the ray bend? Ask me why it bends toward the normal, what the critical angle means, or anything about refraction.

Buffy is an AI helper and can be wrong — always check your NCERT textbook.