Reflection inside spherical mirror

By the laws of optics, the reflections will occur in the plane formed by the initial ray and the center of the sphere, and this is a planar problem.

Now consider the circle where you are standing and the successive intersection points of the reflected rays with it.

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By symmetry, these points will be located at angles that follow an arithmetic progression, and the angular delta from the initial point is $n\alpha\bmod1=\{n\alpha\}$, where the angles are expressed in turns. Now it is clear that the ray will come back iff $\alpha$ is a rational number. If it is irrational it will never come back exactly but you can always find an $n>0$ such that $\{n\alpha\}<\epsilon$ for any $\epsilon$.

The situation is similar for the second intersection points with the ray, at angles $n\alpha+\beta$, where $\beta$ is independent of $\alpha$*. But then, it may turn out that $n\alpha+\beta$ is a integer by coincidence so that even with irrational $\alpha$ there can be an exact return (only one because $n'\alpha+\beta$ cannot be another integer).

To summarize:

The return angles are $\{n\alpha\}$ and $\{n\alpha+\beta\}$, corresponding to

  • irrational $\alpha\to$ zero or one exact return plus infinitely many close ones, or

  • rational $\alpha\to$ infinitely many exact periodic returns but no close ones.


*As said somewhere else, the figure has two degrees of freedom: the (relative) distance to the center and the (relative) starting ray direction.


Each time the light reflects it then traverses a chord, and all such chords will be the same length because of Snell's Law of reflection. If this length is $2r\sin(\theta /2)$ for $\theta=$ some rational multiple of $\pi$, the beam will trace out a convex or stellated polygon and hit you again. Else the beam misses you, but it fills in a ring whose outer boundary is on the sphere and whose inner boundary is inside the sphere (corresponding to how closely a chord of fixed length comes close to the center). This causes the beam to come arbitrarily close if given enough reflections.