Snell's law

[ snelz ]

noun

, Optics.

1. the law that, for a ray incident on the interface of two media, the sine of the angle of incidence times the index of refraction of the first medium is equal to the sine of the angle of refraction times the index of refraction of the second medium.

Snell's law

/ snɛlz /

noun

1. physics the principle that the ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence to the sine of the angle of refraction is constant when a light ray passes from one medium to another

Word History and Origins

Origin of Snell's law¹

Named after Willebrod Snell van Royen (died 1626), Dutch mathematician

Word History and Origins

Origin of Snell's law¹

C17: named after Willebrord Snell (1591–1626), Dutch physicist

Example Sentences

Buffon could, if he wished, look back to the seventeenth century and identify a whole series of laws that had been discovered during the Scientific Revolution: Stevin’s law of hydrostatics, Galileo’s law of fall, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Snell’s law of refraction, Boyle’s law of gases, Hooke’s law of elasticity, Huygens’ law of the pendulum, Torricelli’s law of flow, Pascal’s law of fluid dynamics, Newton’s laws of motion and law of gravity.

From Literature

Harriot independently discovered what we now call Galileo’s law of fall, and also what we now call Snell’s law of refraction, but he never published.

From Literature

To mention only a portion of Harriot’s work, he discovered Snell’s law of refraction two decades before mathematician Willebrord Snell; formulated laws of motion and falling bodies independently of Galileo and decades before Isaac Newton; produced the first drawing of the Moon through a telescope and made important observations of sunspots, again independently of Galileo; played with binary arithmetic nearly a century before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; and was the first to develop fully symbolic algebra.

From Nature

The angle can be calculated using a staple of high school physics called Snell’s law, but in the 17th century Pierre de Fermat provided a deeper explanation: the light beam acts as though it were trying to minimize its total travel time.

From New York Times

The angles and refractive indices of the two media are related by Snell's law.

From Scientific American