Talk:Schmidt–Pechan prism
 | A fact from Schmidt–Pechan prism appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 23 November 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:
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"require a coating maximizing reflection" in Glass–air transitions section[edit]
Only the one silvered surface needs reflection maximized. The others have total internal reflection, which is lossless. (There is no solution to Maxwell's equation outside the glass that matched the field at the interface.) Only if the coating material itself is lossy, rather than a dielectric, can there be light lost. It looks like there are two faces which both transmit and reflect. David R. Ingham (talk) 00:35, 6 August 2022 (UTC)