Deflection (physics)
A deflection, in physics, refers to the change in an object's velocity as a consequence of contact (collision) with a surface or the influence of a field. Examples of the former include a ball bouncing off the ground or a bat; examples of the latter include a beam of electrons used to produce a picture, or the relativistic bending of light due to gravity.
An object hitting a surface is an example of deflection.
Deflective efficiency
An object's deflective efficiency can never equal or surpass 100%, for example:
- a mirror will never reflect exactly the same amount of light cast upon it, though it may concentrate the light which is reflected into a narrower beam.
- on hitting the ground, a ball previously in free-fall (meaning no force other than gravity acted upon it) will never bounce back up to the place where it first started to descend.
This transfer of some energy into heat or other radiation is a consequence of the theory of thermodynamics, where, for every such interaction, some energy must be converted into alternative forms of energy or is absorbed by the deformation of the objects involved in the collision.
gollark: PotatOS doesn't use bytecode and do not break backward compatibility or else.
gollark: it was never used.
gollark: The emergency shutdown thing was added after an issue when I retasked all PotatOS machines to spam a rednet chat server and couldn't stop them.
gollark: The SPUDNET interface is highly concurrent™ so you could just send a shutdown command while it is doing other things and it'd work.
gollark: It just doesn't have a dedicated emergency shutdown thing now, since the interface for remote debugging got actual parallelism ages back.
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