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Optical levers, as demonstrated by a disco ball
FOTOLIA

3 Down The term ‘optical’ will be well known to you, but you may not have heard of the optical lever.

Imagine something, some object, is going to move, and especially rotate relative to another. This rotation can be demonstrated and the effect magnified by the use of a beam of light. Suppose you shine a torch beam onto a wall and then move the torch slightly through a small angle; the patch of light on the wall will move. If the wall was further away then the same small movement of the torch would obviously produce a much greater linear distance movement on that wall. So a small movement is enhanced by a greater length of beam. This is called an optical lever.

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