Why is when look at the bottom of a spoon, your reflection is right side up but when you in the front it is inverted?

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So, we're basically talking about concave and convex mirrors.The bottom of the spoon is a convex mirror. The reason you're right-side-up (and distorted) is that the light reflected off of you hits the spoon and gets scattered *outward* from the spoon's suface. Top stays at the top and bottom stays at the bottom.On the other hand, the front of the spoon is a concave mirror which scatters your reflection inward toward a focal point , and then the light beams cross before they reach your eye, which makes it appear that top becomes bottom and left becomes right.Check out the link below for some diagrams on how this all works.































www.physicsclassroom.com

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The back of a spoon has a convex surface, whereas the other side is concave. What you have is a rough version of a convex and concave mirror. The lens equation states the following:1/d_o +1/d_i= 1/fwhere d_o is the distance of the object, d_i is the distance of the image, and f is the focal length.Another equation that is useful is the magnification, which is -(d_i/d_o).All convex mirrors have a negative focal length, by convention, and all concave mirrors have a positive focal length. The reason is because when a ray hits a convex surface, it is diverted away from the surface of the mirror, causing the image "in" that mirror to appear as if it is focused beind the mirror. A concave mirror focuses light, as opposed to diverging it, and therefore images appear as if they are formed in front of it.Let's use the equations to give us a better idea. Say you have an object that is very far away, s that d_o is some large number. We can assume 1/d_o is approximately 0. The lens equation becomes:1/d_i=1/fBut f is negative for a convex mirror, and so in order for the equality to hold, d_i must also be negative. What this tells us is what we already suspected: the image is formed behind the surface of the mirror (spoon), and that is why it has a negative d_i. We can use the magification equation to give us information about whether or not the image is upright or inverted.-(d_i/d_o)where we know that d_i is negative (from above) while d_o is some positive number. That means we have two negative values which multiply against each other, giving a positive value. That means that the image is not inverted, and smaller (keep in mind that this is not always the case, since we must keep track of the values, based on whether they are closer or farther away from the focal length, f).The opposite is true for a concave mirror:1/d_i=1/f, where f is positive.Since d_i is positive, the magification equation gives us a negative value, meaning the image is inverted.All of these equations are based upon the way that light is focused by mirrors, keeping in mind that a convex mirror diverges rays away from its surface while a concave mirror converges those rays.

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