refract

Our legal institutions and the broader culture refract their policy values back at each other.

From Slate ● May 26, 2026

Apparently, a lot of folks feel seeing people in the real world is too taxing, and it's easier to refract your urge for connection to an app that offers only an inch-deep simulacrum.

From Salon ● Jan. 19, 2025

The same physics that makes light refract into patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool or causes stars to twinkle in the night sky also causes DISS.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 26, 2024

“We mourn her loss but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” Farmer said.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 17, 2023

But it could not show the mechanism which causes light to reflect or refract, or the particles that cause smells.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

We might be told that color has something to do with light, or even be shown a prism, through which light refracts to produce a rainbow.

From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024

In the retina of an animal's eye, there is a small pit called the fovea that refracts the light entering the eye.

From Science Daily ● May 30, 2024

It is also known as a Bravais' arc, and is formed when sunlight enters horizontal ice crystals and refracts through a side prism face, which causes the upside-down effect.

From BBC ● May 29, 2023

Slote said this was “a good capsule description; the artist takes their experience and refracts it, and turns it into something else.”

From New York Times ● Sep. 21, 2022

Sunlight refracts through it and casts slivers of rainbows across the floor.

From "Allegiant" by Veronica Roth

The French come closest to a grand national idea—liberté, egalité, fraternité, although this is refracted through repeated failures to convert those principles into stable governance.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026

Every subsequent loss is refracted through that lens.

From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2025

Still, there’s also something kind of profound in contemplating 2000, even if it is refracted through this movie’s silly lens.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 6, 2024

The reddish color comes from the light being refracted by particles in the atmosphere.

From Slate ● Apr. 5, 2024

Above us I could see its rippling surface, and above that the blue, refracted sky, and as we rose toward it the water warmed dramatically.

From "Hollow City" by Ransom Riggs

Mr. Self has great fun refracting the details of who did what to whom and where.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 20, 2026

Democritus believed that light refracting through atoms caused the phenomenon that we perceive and describe conventionally, or by mutual agreement, as color.

From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024

Smartphones can act as anxiety incubators, amplifying the sense of abundant possibility like a prism refracting light.

From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2024

They number in the thousands, light striking the phalanx of lenses arrayed on a face in geometric pattern, the beams refracting through transparent mounds no wider than a hair.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 23, 2023

Alight placed above the center of the tank shines through the water, refracting as it ripples.

From "Allegiant" by Veronica Roth