A swimming pool is 1 meter deep at the shallow end and 3 meter deep at the deep end.to a person standing on the edge of the shallow end, the depth of the pool seems approximately the same everywhere. Explain and give a diagram?
1 Answer
Here you have the optical effect called Refraction and the formation of an "Apparent Depth" inside the medium (water).
Explanation:
Consider the diagram:
You can see yellow beams of light originating from different points of the floor of the pool at various depths inside the water. In passing from water to air the beams are bent (Refraction) and reach our eyes.
Our brain doesn't know about the bending and interprets the beams as originated from a point above the real one (on the perpendicular line represented by the dotted grey vertical line) and obtained prolongating the beam using the red ones (not bent).
An image will be formed in our brain (violet horizontal line) obtained by considering the red beams giving an almost uniform apparent depth different from the real one.
Hope it helps!
