Question

One of ways that a forensic scientist can figure out the make and model of a car from a “hit and run” collision is if they can pick up a piece of plastic from the headlight of the car. The plastics in a car tend to be dissimilar for different makes and models of cars and thus have different indices of refraction which you can find in a table. If you were given a flat piece of plastic from a hit and run, write down a procedure to figure out what type of car was involved in the hit and run.

If you put a penny in a coffee cup and look at just the edge of the penny over the rim of the cup and then fill the cup with water, do you see more of the penny, less of the penny or the same amount as the penny as you did without the water? Explain your answer. (A sketch is very useful for this question.)

Up until this point, we have assumed that all colors of visible light all have the same index of refraction. This is not completely true. The reason that rainbows form is since many materials have different index of refractions for different colors. If we have a block of plastic similar to what we used in lab and we shine all the colors on it (white light) we will create a rainbow. The light that bends the most is the blue light and the light that bends the least is the red light. Which color has the highest index of refraction when inside plastic block?