the beach!

After school on Friday my friends and i went to walls to boogie board! we didn't get there till like 5:00 though cuz we stopped at my friends house and then we got acai. but we were really excited to go boogie boarding. i haven't done that in a long time. but we got there and there was absolutely no waves. and there were also no people on the beach. it was so weird it was the emptiest I've ever seen walls during the day. so since there were no waves to catch, we just floated out past the end of the wall on our boards and relaxed. here comes the physics! the water was super clear so we could see the reef and everything. one of my friends kept asking if the bottom was shallow enough to touch because it looked really close. I then tried to touch it but found it was actually pretty deep. and i was like "hey it's refraction!" The reef appeared closer to us than it actually was because light travels slower in water. Since it was getting pretty late, the sun was really low and a lot of it's light was reflecting off the water. One of my friends was like "I could use some polarized sunglasses right now." Polarized sunglasses would have blocked the glare on the water with a horizontally aligned filter because the light rays that were reflected of the water were only vibrating horizontally. yeah so that was my physics experience of the day. yay.