An Investigation to see how the size of ashadow depends on the angle at which the light hits the object

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An Investigation to see how the size of a shadow depends on the angle at which the light hits the object

Introduction

The aim of the project is to see which factors affect the size of a shadow and then to look more closely at one of the factors to see how exactly it varies the size of a shadow.

Variables that may affect the size of the shadow

Although, I will investigate how one factor affects the size of a shadow, there are other factors that could be investigated. Here are some examples:

  1. The distance between the light and the object

From the ray diagrams I can see that as the distance from the object to the light source is doubled, the length of the shadow decreases. A distance of 4cm produces a shadow of approximately 1.6-cm. Decreasing the distance to 2cm(half the distance), the shadow size increases by one and a half times to produce a shadow of 2.3 cm. The three ray diagrams together show the increase of the distance between the object and light source, decreasing the length of the shadow.

2) The distance between the object and the screen

The results from this are opposite varying the previous factor. In this case the length of the shadow increased as the distance from the edge of the object to the screen increased. I expected that as the distance dubled, the length of the shadow would double but according to the ray diagram that was not the case. The length of the shadow

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The results from this are opposite to varying the previous factor. In this case, the length of the shadow increased as the distance from the edge of the object to the screen increased. I expected that as the distance doubled, the length of the shadow would double but according to the ray diagrams, that was not the case.  The length of the shadow increased by 1.6 times between changing the distance from 2 cm to 4 cm (ie:doubling the distance). For changing the distance to 6 cm increased the length of the shadow, which was ...

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