Perfectly reflecting room?

Question

Suppose there is a room in which all four walls plus the ceiling and the floor are covered with mirrors. If I am in this room with a burning candle in my hand, and I blow the candle off, what would happen? Would it get pitch dark immediately? I don't think that would happen since light doesn't get absorbed by anything in this room (other than my body), it just keeps bouncing off the mirrors. So would the light die out slowly? Or would the room remain luminous forever?

Answer 1

Even if we are not bothered by you body absorbing, if your eye can see it, then it is absorbing it.  I guess it will get dark each direction you look.

Answer 2

Holy c**p. What have you been smoking? :)

Answer 3

As long as the room was above absolute zero, there would be radation in the form of infra red light given off (see blackbody radiation), so yes it would be luminous forever, or pretty close

Answer 4

Light travels as tiny packets of mass-less energy at the speed of light which can react with the electrons orbiting atoms and molecules.  Your body and the candle would almost instantly absorb all of the light.  Ignoring that, it is impossible to manufacture perfectly reflecting surfaces and the light would be absorbed by any imperfections.  Ignoring all imperfections a theoretically perfect reflecting room would reflect light forever.  But nothing is perfect (even a few particles of soot from the candle would eventually absorb all the light!).  

Answer 5

Of course not!  The light will die out almost immediately, with the difference of a fraction of a second, which you will not notice.

But yes, good thinking for an beginner, but you have a misconception.

When you light something, it does not mean that you are 'letting' out light, and it individually keeps on traveling till it dies of energy-no. That is a grave misconception. Light is just a series of waves, and once its source is removed, there are no more waves. But I said fraction of a second, because light has many models- this was the wave model, it also has a photon model in which light consists of particles, which are carriers of EM waves (ElectroMagnetic). But it does not exist itself, but carries the wave (photons are mass-less) so together it is only able to exist for a limited period of time. A photon can only transfer energy to another, so the ones right before you extinguished the candle transfer energy similar to a chain reaction, till it cannot carry on, and the light dies. The light would die out within 1/1000th of a second.