What the title says, thanks!
In: 282
The light bounces around, losing energy with each reflection, until it completely dissipates. It looks a bit like this:
It gets absorbed in microseconds. There is no such thing as a perfect mirror, 95-98% reflectivity for the best ones. So it’s all turned to heat in a few hundred bounces which, at the speed of light, only takes a fraction of a second.
Like with all such questions, the sad (but true) answer is “there is no such thing as a perfect mirror ball”, because thermodynamics is a bitch like that. Light goes bounce bounce, ball heats up, your experiment ends – like life, the universe and everything – with some waste heat, slowly dispersing.
You didn’t specify if the experimenter is inside the ball. If yes, the experimenter gets to party first.
The ball gets heavier.
If you find a way to introduce photons inside a ball of perfect mirrors, like you teleport them in or something, and there’s a perfect vacuum inside the ball, they’ll bounce around forever.
That’s because the light inside will behave as a gas, called photon gas ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas)) and has pressure, temperature, the whole shebang. The added weight equals the energy of the photons, which will be very little. But its weight will defo increase. I swear I’m not… gaslighting you.
If you keep teleporting light in it, the temperature and pressure will increase until it reaches the melting point (or the breaking point, whichever first) of the material the ball is made of. Then it’ll crack and release the light inside all at once, which should be quite a flash.
Since we’re already in wonderland, with the perfect mirrors and perfect vacuum and teleporting light, we could add that the ball never melts and is unbreakable and perfectly insulating.
Then you can keep teleporting light in it, and you’ll start noticing it gets noticeably heavier.
You can’t do that indefinitely though. At some point, it’ll turn into a black hole.
Others have answered your question. To add a fun idea you can also create an incredibly powerful explosion using mirrors, light, and a black hole.
Would you be able to carry the light around forever and then when you wanted a burst of light, you open the ball?
Most of the light will continually bounce off the mirrors until it escapes from the hole you’re shining the light through.
If you stopped the light from escaping you’re on your way to a laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser
Okay but also theoretically what would happen if it’s a perfect two-way mirror ball where you can see in but the inside is perfectly reflective.
Would it glow bright because you’d see the light in there or would it look black inside because it’s a closed ball?
What if you built the mirror ball around a flashlight/light source?
if its perfectly sealed would it still just dissipate after awhile or would the flashlight sending a constant beam of light just cause an explosion?
It goes dark in a tiny fraction of a second, because there’s no such thing IRL as a perfect mirror. Every photon will be end up being absorbed, even if it’s after a large number of reflections – and a single photon can reflect a LOT of times in a VERY short time.
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