Given a box made with six “perfect” mirrors, and a light source that can be introduced without disrupting the reflections, could I turn on the light and “trap” it in the box for use at a later time?
I’m planning a camping trip and don’t want to carry a generator in my backpack for light when I need it. 
We’ve been through this before. If anything, a sphere might work better.
“We” have? Can you direct me to the thread?
If you had perfect mirrors, it would work. But you don’t. And a mirror which is merely, say, 99.99% perfect isn’t nearly good enough.
And you can’t be in the box, otherwise all the photons will be absorbed by you. Very quickly.
The thread is weightless.
In a vacuum.
Welcome to SD. Had panache45 left out the second part of his brief post you would have witnessed the truly awesome Thumbsquish of the Mods. A sticky somewhere talks about that, and about minimum referencing/searching “necessary” by new posters (the answer is hardly any), and elsewhere is a sticky about stroking Google for all the right moves to filter SD.
Plus you have the search bars for the front page and for the forums. Godspeed. You’ll wind up in About This Message Board forum soon enough to bitch about it if you find it necessary, where you’ll be told…“we’ve been through this before.” 
ETA: Your hed made me wonder what my life would be like were it to be a personal challenge, with a swap for Jesus. (Who is THE light, according to some.)
Might be easier to convert your photons into electrons … store them that way …
Neither can your light source really, or it gets in the way and absorbs the light.
Nah, you just have to jerk it out of the box and seal the hole real fast!
You would have to jerk it out of the hole and light speed, so that isnt exactly possible
And seal the hole in the same motion.
Houston, we have a problem
HOLE
we have imperfection in the mirror
You know, a good Demon could handle that.
Mea Culpa – I did search for “light trap” and mirrors, and since I was told that “we” had discussed it, I didn’t think to go back through a half a decade+ of threads.
No, you could arrange your box so that the distance the light source and door needed to move was less than the size of the box, so you could move them at slower than light speed. It’d still be really, really tough, but it’s just an engineering problem.
There’s been something in the news about trapping photons, just recently. You’ll find various articles discussing it, if you search on “trap photons.”
Nothing you can use on your camping trip, though.
Even if you had perfect mirrors, and could trap the light, it would only last for maybe 1/10 of a nanosecond once you opened the box.
That depends on the size of the box. For a 1 inch box, what you say is true. If the box is a foot wide, the beam would last a whole nanosecond. If it’s 300,000 kilometers wide, it would last a second. Although a 300,000 kilometer box would be awkward to take on a camping trip.
Let’s start thinking more practically here. Why not just leave the photons orbiting around a black hole until you need them?