: If white objects reflect all forms of light, how come they don’t act as mirrors?

Question

: If white objects reflect all forms of light, how come they don’t act as mirrors?

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Answer 1

There are a couple “styles” of 100% reflector: rough and smooth.

If you have a rough surface (at the microscopic level) and you’re 100% reflective, then you bounce back all the light that hits you, but it reaches peoples’ eyes as a disorganized jumble that’s a mix of all the colors. They can’t make out any image, but because they’re getting all the colors they see white.

If you have a smooth surface and you’re 100% reflective, you bounce back all the light that hits you, coherently. So the light from a person’s eyebrow bounces out above the light from their eye, which is next to the light from their nose, and so on. When that reaches peoples’ eyes they see an ‘organized’ image which we call a reflection.

You could show the same thing by taking a post someone made, and either copying it exactly, or re-typing it with the letters in a random order. In both cases you’ve “reflected” all the letters, but the disorganized version won’t make much sense.