Prism question

Factual Questions
1

Ok, heres a question thats been bugging me on and off for 25 years.

At school we all did experiments with prisms and bent light around corners.

If you constructed a prism in such a way that when you shone light into it, the light bounced from face to face to face internally until it started repeating on itself, would there be a limit to how much light it could hold.

Since light has no mass, I would have thought not, but I am not sure.

Plus If you smashed the prism, would you see anything?

presumeably all the light would scatter in a tiny fraction of a second and be gone, so would you register this huge release of light?

2

Well, I’m not 100% sure this is right, but I think it wouldn’t work because of entropy.

You shine light into the prism… SOME of it gets absorbed by the material of the prism itself and turned into heat… so eventually it would ALL turn into heat, and you wouldn’t have any light left.

Plus, some of the light would escape, I think, back out through whatever opening through which you were shining it into the prism.

If this would work, why not just make a spherical mirror, shiny on the inside of course, and ‘fill it up’ with light a few times a month, instead of having light bulbs? I’m sure there’s a good reason.

3

Mirror Sphere (related)

Is it possible to trap light?

One-way sphere