Can lasers get trapped in a waterfall?

Yes. This is due to a phenomenon called total internal reflection which occurs when light is travelling through a dense material and hits a boundary of a less dense material, for instance from water to air. read more

Lasers are the secret weapon of science - they're incredibly powerful, super versatile, and they can travel across incredible distances. But as this simple experiment shows, for all that power, it's actually possible to 'trap' a laser beam in water. read more

Laser Waterfall. Learn about total internal reflection in this video from the Encyclopedia of Physics Demonstrations. A laser beam is aligned so that the light passes through a water tank and out through an opening. As water flows out of the opening, observe how the laser beam remains trapped in the water stream because of total internal reflection. read more

Because they're made up of long fibres of glass or plastic, these fibre optic cables can trap beams of light, just like the waterfall does in the video above, and can guide it anywhere its needed. And that's useful, because we can encode things like the latest episode of Game of Thrones in that light. read more