Revisiting A Surprising Demonstration of Total Internal Reflection

Melton demonstrated a surprising disappearance using total internal reflection. When he put a Florence flask filled with marbles into a water tank and looked straight down from directly above the flask, he was only able to see marbles above a certain water level. When he added more water into the tank above the top line of the marbles, all of the marbles disappeared. He explained this phenomenon as due to a combination of both refraction and total internal reflection. Here, we wanted to develop this surprising idea to create more surprises. However, in our case, we only took the refraction effect from Melton’s idea to demonstrate our magic. This idea is supported by various perspectives. For instance, Viss and Sikkema demonstrated the critical angle without using total internal reflection, and James showed the novel optical properties of a submerged light bulb.