Acceleration and Velocity are vectors. Changes in a velocity vector are an acceleration. Therefore when photons change direction technically it’s a form of acceleration.
Entropius
joined 2 years ago
LiDAR is essentially radar that uses light instead of sound
Radar doesn’t use sound. It sounds like the author doesn’t know the difference between sonar and radar.
Space bending is a general relativity thing, which isn’t really related much to how mirrors work.
Regarding the medium bit, photons being absorbed and remitted can’t explain how light moves slower in glass. This is just an extremely popular myth. Photons are only absorbed by atoms at very specific frequencies. Also, the entire reason glass is transparent to begin with is that it’s not absorbing the photons (requires too much energy to bump the electron’s energy level so the photon isn’t absorbed and it keeps on trucking). Also photon absorption and remission is stochastic so there’s no way to control the direction it happens in or how quickly it happens. Random directions of remitted light would make glass translucent, not transparent. So for a few reasons, that’s not how it works.