I mean, what does a white object do? Absorbs nothing, reflects all light back.
What does a mirror do? Absorbs nothing, reflects all light back.
Having the same characteristics, how does a mirror reflect an image and a white object, a white texture?
In: Physics
Both a mirror and a white surface reflect most of the light.
But a white surface is rough if you zoom in, and the light rays that hit it reflects in different random directions,
while a mirror is very smooth and correctly reflects light based on the angle of incidence.
[Very helpful image!](https://imgur.com/a/gEqqWOw)
The white object reflects most of the light back but critically it also diffuses it while the mirror also reflects most of it back but doesn’t diffuse it. It reflects it directly back so that the information carried by it stays coherent.
If all the light bounces off an object at a similar angle it will “preserve the image” so to speak.
Otherwise if it is scattered in random directions there’s no “image” for your eye to see.
White surfaces are rough, while mirrors are smooth.
That’s why the light gets reflected in all kinds of directions and all mixed together into white, while the mirror just reflects the rays back as they come in – a clear image.
In a fun-house mirror, you see light from several angles because the reflection is distorted.
White objects are microscopically wrinkly and rough mirrors.
So for every point on the surface, you see the average of the light from all angles.
It’s about angle of reflection. “White” things scatter the light. Reflective things bounce light ray or photon back towards the source, the more reflective, the more of them / more accurately. That’s why very reflective things are also usually super smooth, and have relatively high density of the material.
The difference is in the angle of the individual reflected light rays with the surface which depends on the roughness of the surface.
A mirror is basically a very polished white-ish object.
Mirror is flat so all light bounces back in one direction.
White surface is very rough (at small scale) so light bounces in all sorts of directions
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