The Most Reflective Mirror In The World 

oh god thats evil

That's gonna be the new BrIgHtEsT IDeA.

Gosh that’s just pure op

invisible

You just invented a new crime

It's called Shiny Object Syndrome

hi jhonbus have you become a flat earther yet?

😂😅

OOH SHINY * neuron activation *

So you're saying there is a small piece of this material in every cell phone with a screen? *exits to disassemble old cell phone.

modern art

​@@Enhancedliesgod

Very dark, you would just see the walls which are black

​@@Enhancedlieshow the translation?

@@lbgstzockt8493 I love living in a room of ⬛

Is there a way to aim a laser through the mirror at another mirror for an attempted infinite beam bounce reflection? 99.5% is close,what if it was 100%?

@@pyrocrabb12 Yes thats how a laser works in most cases. Between those two mirrors (also called resonator mirrors, the whole thing is a resonator) is a laser medium. For gas lasers it is some type of gas for example helium and neon. For solid state lasers it is some type of crystal like Ti:sapphire. To get the actual laser light out of theses media, it has to be pumped. Pumping means in this application, that you take some kind of light source with the right light spectrum, shoot it into to the resonator where the light passes through the medium many times, absorbs this light and energetically excite parts of the medium into a higher state. This state is not stable and the media gets rid of the energy in form of light. Then the medium is in his energetically base state, where it can be excited again. Since these resonator mirrors doesnt reflect 100% of the light, you can make them so thin, that a tiny amount of laser light escapes through a tine hole (not in the mirror but in the housing behind the mirror) and can use for experiments. In general a laser needs much more electrical power than comes out of the laser as optical power. They are quite inefficient. The reason we use lasers is due to the long coherence length, where most of the light has the same phase and wavelength. We have a ideal, predictable light source. We can also build optics without major optical aberrations and therefore focus the light into such small spaces, that we achieve optical power densitys of MW per cm^2 and more. This description lacks some details, because of my language barrier and some details being a little bit difficult to explain.

@@pyrocrabb1299.5% isn’t close to 100%! It’s infinitely far from it. The intensity will be only 1% after 918 bounces: log(0.01)/log(0.995) = 918.7 Percent left = (percent reflectivity/100)^bounces 99.9999% would be 1% brightness after about 5 million bounces.

@@float32 Is 100% possible?

​@@pyrocrabb12 Kind of, it's called an optical cavity. You don't actually need a fancy way to get the light in, you can just straight up shoot it through the first mirror. Sounds weird, but it works: The ~0.5% that don't get reflected, instead go through the first mirror and enter the space between the mirrors (the cavity). This light will bounce back and fourth between the two mirrors for a while. During that time, more and more light is leaking through the first mirror, so that the light inside the cavity actually builds up quite strong (this only works at a specific wavelength!). In fact it will be much stronger inside the cavity than the original laser beam you sent onto the first mirror! If you get the alignment right, actually the light inside the cavity will be so strong that the little bit that leaks back out (so also the ~0.5%, but this time from the inside to outside) will be exactly as strong as the original laser you sent in. So on the first mirror you have the ~99.5% light being reflected directly, but also the light leaking back out of the cavity. These two beams will cancel each other out entirely, because light is a wave. So you actually have no reflection at all! The second mirror also leaks ~0.5% of the light, so you have a beam as strong as the input laser coming out of the second mirror. (TLDR:) Which means: if you get the wavelength and alignment right, it's as if the two mirrors were completely transparent! No matter how reflective they actually are! I personally got about 5% of light transmitting through two mirrors with a reflectivity of around 99.9998%. Also you can just make the light inside the cavity. That's what pretty much all lasers do.

"fidgeting", as it's commonly called, is a valid scientific process...

I wander if that engineer is one one of many who worked for the DOD in order to create the invisibility camouflage for military ships. If that’s the case than I doubt it was really a accidental discovery.

The important part is understanding that the visual result you get was unexpected even for an expert and therefore worth further research.

This reminds me when i was kid, one time i was folding a clear plastic bag to have similar effect

the meeting was BORING to say less.

That's interesting, thanks! I would have thought they just sputter coat them, but this is way more economical

And now I want to see what happens if you wrap a car in the elastomer version and apply different stretch/tension across it. Would be a pretty funky look.

@@2lstGun At the time I saw the stuff demonstrated at Dow (late '88 or early '89), they had been working with Ford for a few years and they showed a Taurus that had a lower layer count film (like a partially silvered one-way mirror) molded on to the exterior of the turn-signal/marker-light assemblies and applied to the windows. The rest of the car was polished and clear coated, giving the effect of a seamless silver bubble. Sort of the ultimate urban camouflage, although driving a near invisible car seemed like the worst idea ever (about what I would expect from a Dow/Ford collaboration).

hi @robertlapointe4093, I am currently working on a product in optics which requires high reflectance, is it possible we could connect if you are interested?

@@samj4971 I was not directly involved in the project and only got a glimpse of the products they were making, so I doubt I could be of any help. I am not sure if 3M is making any of this material now or not. Searching for 3M reflective material only brings up links to their retroreflective products, which I suspect is not what you are interested in.

What country?

@@OPOS-el7tj Vatican

I always thought what it would look like in a perfect mirror like bubble that ur inside of

pull up your selfie cam and point it at a mirror...

Well if you turn on a light, you'll probably get blind.

...or a room-size unilluminable room

you mean a Kozyrev Mirror?

There's actually no such thing as a one-way mirror, I'm afraid...

Yes, it would improve the performance but there is more to the story. I think you are talking about a "first surface mirror." In a first surface mirror, the reflective coating is appled to the side facing you ( for facing the second mirror in an infinity mirror setup.) A first surface mirror is far more reflective than a standard mirror because with a standard mirror, the light has to pass though the glass to get to the coating, the it has to reflect off of the coatiing where there is some loss, and back though the glass. Standard float glass has a transmission of only about 90% so the loss from each mirror would be considerable, so yes, you use first surface mirrors for a good effect. The problem with using dialectic is that it is very expensive to apply so a large infinity mirror would be super expensive. It would indeed improve the depth of an infinity mirror though. A cheap infinity mirror gets dark really fast because they are using standard mirrors. An infinity mirror made with high enhanced, protected aluminum will do almost as well at a far lower cost, but it would still be quite expensive for a larger mirrors. (Enhanced Aluminnim with special coatings can have a 93% reflectiity, so that is not all that much less than dieletcric, but even protected enhanced aluminum is fairly expensive, thouhgh I have no doubt that it would be less than a dieletric of the same size.

That would work, I like it.

X-rays can be soft or hard?

@@AuxiliaryPanther Soft x-rays vs hard x-rays is a question of their energy. Typically soft x-rays are considered those that have energy up to about 10 keV (kilo electron-volt). The border between extreme UV light, soft x-rays, hard x-rays and gamma rays is not strictly defined: it mostly depends on applications or the type of light sources, but the more energy, the "harder" the radiation gets.

@@AuxiliaryPanther I used to think hard water meant ice. I wasn't wrong!

@@SwissPGO okay, so higher amplitude x-rays are "harder". Thanks!

@@AuxiliaryPanther Hmmm, not "amplitude" but energy of the photon, amplitude is not a term used very often in relation to light sources. Brightness would be a better term. Brightness relates to the amount of photons emitted, not the energy of the individual photon, so there could be equally bright soft and hard x-ray sources. The terminology soft vs hard x-rays is related to the energy of the individual photons. Shorter wavelength photons have more energy, and have a deeper penetration into matter before they are absorbed, scattered or reflected. Thats why they are called harder than longer wavelength photons. it's like comparing a nerf gun's ammo (soft) to a 9mm bullet (hard).

That would be amazing

Was gonna say this too 😂

@@InstagramUser420Google translate fails on this post.

Might be pretty expensive.

@@InstagramUser420 Oh, a wild edgelord appears!! *yawn

Pikes peak has a lot of that stuff.

Had the same thought about mica. On another level, x-rays telescope use several layers of metal sheets in order to reflect them

Good observation. The crystal structure probably is doing something very similar, but locally limited to more particular angles than the randomized structure of the polymer.

and in cold areas it should switch

I don't think he claimed that a single layer of the 'spaghetti' material was reflective -- apparently it is transparent. I believe he only mentioned the 'spaghetti' in regards to polarization -- in this case the non-polarization of light. Anyway, as I understand it, the film is many layers (of varying thickness) of the transparent 'spaghetti' material and that's where the reflectance comes from.

It's not so expensive, found some for $30 for 11"x11".

This 3M ESR film isn't sold to the public unfortunately It is only sold to manufacturers that use it in products. And they wouldn't tell me who they sell it to. Dielectric mirrors in general, are available but not as high reflectivity as this 3M one.

@@TheActionLabwhy are they unwilling to sell to the public?

​@@mxcollin95Probably has something to do with it being a relatively newer product without a lot of research to be able to know what potentially could go wrong if it got into the wrong hands. That barrier would quickly get broken if there were a huge public demand, but if there isn't a huge demand, the manufacturers may just want to protect themselves from some frivolous lawsuit from somebody that used this film on a slightly curved window of his house and ended up starting a fire inside his neighbor's house because it focused the sunlight to a dot through a window to a wall at 30 feet away inside his neighbor's bedroom. A mirror could theoretically do the same thing, but nobody could sue a mirror manufacturer, because normal mirrors have already been in use for countless decades. But this film is quite new and untested in raw public wholesale. So they probably just don't want to end up getting sued over something stupid like that. Or maybe if somebody used it to make a weapon, the manufacturer could get sued unless this product gets recognized as a standard household material first.

@@HeyChickens ya…good points.

Gotta be careful when touching on those mirrors- you might leave a fingerprint and cut down on their reflectivity!

It's already used commonly for lasers.

@@TheUnderscore_ I figured as much, and can appreciate some high gains in efficiency for a relatively low cost material.

They are the most used mirrors in optics laboratories. They are pretty cheap nowadays, just look on thorlabs or similar distributors. I don't even remember when I last used a metal mirror. Making them reflective for just a small range of wavelengths is actually much easier than making a broadband mirror. But it's just thin film optics, if you stack enough layers you can make any arbitrary wavelength filter. Usually when they are specifically made to be very reflective for some wavelengths and very transmissive for others, they are called dichroic mirrors. "99.5%" isn't a hard limit either. If you stack enough layers (aka pay the manufacturer enough) you can make stupidly reflective mirrors. We have some that reflect all but ~2 millionth of the light, so 99.9998% reflectivity. But really except for optical cavities, the 99% you get from something like a BB1-E02 is more than enough

They're called dichroic mirrors

Yeah! Fascinating thought!

He replied in another comment that 3M does not sell it to us commoners unfortunately. I had the same thought!

@@zapperone7: Oh, sorry I missed that. Well then I wonder how they set him apart of someone who "qualified." And I wonder why.

it looks like the secondary reflections have the same angle, but are offset by some distance from the original reflection. I think that would cause point light sources to look blurry/hazy on a curved mirror. Apparently it will work fine for flat mirrors, there are 90-degree eyepieces that have this as well as binoculars which have two 90's per eye.

Especially if it could be made in a parabolic shape. Also for the type of telelenses that use mirrors it would enable some really lightweight long telelenses

It would not be easy (or probably even possible) to shape it to the right figure. A mirror, to be actually usable in a telescope, must have its surface shape (and roughness) error lower than about 100 nanometers or better (for visible light), and must be rigid enough not to deform under its own weight and ideally not expand/contract when temperature changes. It's relatively easy to achieve that level of precision when polishing glass (it's also can be done with metals, but they have much higher thermal expansion), and when you cover it with vaporized aluminium it has about 92% reflectivity in visible light - but there actually are dielectric mirrors used in telescopes, but often not for main mirrors, but rather eg. in diagonals (though you can get a higher reflectivity coating for your main mirror if you want and have money for it); they are made of glass coated with thin layers of dielectric material, so they work like what we see here, but also keep the shape of the glass. Dielectric coatings are more expensive though, and 99% vs "only" 92% isn't an improvement enough to make it vialabe option for larger mirrors - it probably would be cheaper to make a slightly bigger, aluminium coated mirror to compensate for slightly lower reflectivity. Or you can simply expose your target for a little longer to gather more light, which doesn't cost anything. I know that in most telescopes there are two or more mirrors actually, so loss of light is somewhat greater due to multiple reflections, but still good old aluminium is the most cost effective.

@@Krzysztof_z_Bagien so light weight tele lenses for cameras is perhaps more obvious - though not simple...

@@rasmus619 same rules apply to photographic lenses. I don't really see how this stuff could be used in optics that wouldn't be to much trouble to be worth it. I'm pretty sure its surface quality isn't anywhere near what you need to make an optical mirror. But maybe I'm wrong.

Very true! I hadn't thought about that! It does look like a mirror when you stack those sheets together!

JWST mirror was coated with gold. There were many requirements other than maximizing reflectivity. For example this is made from plastic and many types of plastic are releasing volatiles when placed in vacuum. They would foul up the precision optics.

wrapping just the skirt and air dam of a car and driving in the desert would make the car body appear to float like Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder

Glass can be ground at large sizes to exacting precision. The Hubble Space Telescope was 2.2 microns out of alignment at the edge and that crippled it. Try getting a precisely *curved* thin film polymer to maintain its exact curve and not be quasi randomly 2.2 microns out of alignment *everywhere* .

That's a great idea!👍

I've been wondering if they can use it to make a flashlight that doesn't need a traditional power source. I wouldn't know how to get the shape just right though.

Why would you need a flashlight in an environment that has light? @@FireChronos

All environments have light, it's just a question of how much. @@WalterSamuels

Regular horticultural mylar has a reflectivity of around 98%. And it's cheap and can be big. But seeing what magicians already do with mirrors, I think they have something better

Yes ! But let's see the price, and the weather resistance of the polymer.....

Plants rely on more than just light to grow...

@@travispoulin252 I'm fully aware, I have an indoor and outdoor garden, compost, and fertilizer Just in some places growing plants inside or starting them in the winter indoors it's the lighting that's usually *my* biggest problem As it's a hobby and I can't afford industrial lights, and some get too hot in a small space, and air circulation... It's hard I was not trying to say light is all they need Just that's usually the biggest problem starting them indoors in winter/early spring Or we'll at least for me... And strawberries take 2 years before producing fruit so you'd have to put alot of effort into keeping them fruiting into winter instead of just going into their winter chill phase(I'm not a biologist so I forget the terminology)

no

@@Ben_19MWhy not, the material is good on reflection.

@@jooei2810 i dont know

@@Ben_19M So that is double no, no on making a flashlight and no on that you don’t know if it actually would work. Are you Dr. No by any chance?

@@jooei2810 i dont like flashlights