h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You use the example of a black container in the article, mainly because it's an article about black bodies.
I've had a thought spinning around in my head for a while that I think I coculd air in thiis forum, since it's somewhat diffusely related to the container thing.

Say that the container instead of being black is constructed like two-way mirrors, where, if you're standing on one side it's reflective, and on the other side it's transparent, and you have a perfect globe made in this fashon. Then what happens if you manage to get a ray of light inside this globe? Since the ray of light bounces around inside the globe due to the reflectiveness of the inside, and what is inside the globe can be seen from the outside, will this mean that you've got a globe of light, or what will happen? Will you have an infinite source of light, or will it, which is probably most likely, wear off after a while? I know that for something to be transparent, light will have to pass through it, but what if you somehow could make it totally reflective on the inside and you could still be able to see inside it? Purely theoretically speaking, of course...

This is probably a very daft question, but then again, my friends usually say that I think up some pretty daft things.
Any comments?

Er, for you to see into the sphere, then light must be escaping. Thus, the sphere cannot be perfectly reflective to light inside coz no light would get out for you to see! Not even theoretically can you do this, as the maths just wouldn't work. i.e. The amount of light out O is equal to the total light T inside minus the Reflected light R. Thus A=T-R. If T=1 and R=1 then A=0. Annoying, but it just is

You couldn't construct something which was totally reflective on the inside and yet transparent, because for it to be in any way transparent *some* of the light has to go through, otherwise you'd not be able to see inside...

Once the light had got in, it would continue to bounce around inside but as all of it is always reflected you'd not be able to see any of it...

Yes, I did say that for something to be transparent, light had to pass trough it, but still.. It would have been really cool to see something like it, though, wouldn't it?

Sure it would. Impossibilities are always interesting to watch.

*Thinks about Escher, smiles and holds up an 11D Tesseract in accordance with Clockwise String Theory*

Try holding that... all the angles are pi/2 so what do you see?

Hmm. Very interesting.

I'm seeing myself two years from now.

That reminds me, I saw the sequel to the film Cube the other day. It's called Hypercube :> I guess thats a cube with 16 corners. It's a quite fun film if lacking the pacing of the original, has anyone else seen it? Sorry to suddenly change subject, it's sort of relevent :>