Return to Home Page I have a question for all of you who like to ponder. Why does light reflect from a mirror the way it does? I don't think you can say "because it is made of extremely flat metal." No matter how well one polishes and smooths a reflective surface, it is still extremely uneven on an atomic level. The atoms may be lined up perfectly, but still they are just a bumpy surface of atoms. Imagine the atoms as a whole slew of shiny ball bearings covering the linoleum in your kitchen. If you shone a flashlight onto your ball bearing covered floor, the light would certainly not be reflected like a mirror. Are some atoms flat? No. Then why does light, as its hits the sides of atoms not delfect in all directions? Obviously, atoms are not solid spheres. Obviously electrons absorb and emit light instantaneously. If it didn't happen instantaneously, the image in a mirror would be severely distorted. Physics says that to emit a photon of light, an electron must change it's "orbit" level. Obviously this cannot be a real movement of the electron, or else it would mean that the electron was moving instantaneously or fater than light (which is impossible according to general relativity). So we see that electrons don't have "shells" or "orbit levels" like I was taught in school. It's said that electrons spin. For each pair of electrons, one spins one way, and the other spins opposite. What in the world does this mean? If the electrons are not in structured orbits, what is the reference by which one judges if one electron is spinning oppositely to another? It makes no sense. What I learned in school makes no sense. And it's still being taught! Argh! Is it possible that the reference point (there must be one for opposite spins) is the ether? I'd bet that the ether references everything, because light travels through it at only one rate. Oh, I got off subject, didn't I? The real question is how do individual electrons determine what direction the light that hits them is coming from? And how do they calculate their angle of reflection? If your pondering produces an answer, please let me know.