My Ideas

I've been researching about waves for a  while now and the very nature of all waves is somewhat counter intuitive.   Waves don't have that many characteristics but they do have some odd characteristics.   Take diffraction for instance.   When a wave of any kind passes through an aperture of a size less than the wavelength the wave will diffract or spread out in all directions.   However if the aperture is larger than the wavelength the wave continue on as if it were  a ray.   The reason it does this is that a wave is not a particle but many particles that are perhaps vibrating regardless of the wave direction. Wave causes a bunching up into a crest or a depletion zone called a trough.   Both are potential energy.   The energy is usually in the crests and the troughs.   Basically a wave is a configuration where stuff gets bunched up or un bunched and what those things want to do is become de-bunched un-depleted as in holes needing to be filled.    Waves are seen as spreading out

I'm interested in how 3 materials: Metal Glass Paper Interact with light. Have you ever thought about why metal is shiny while paper is not?  Why does light travel through glass but is stopped by metal?    I've been trying to nail down these things in my mind.  I looked at different articles and watched a number of videos but they only confused me because they seemed to contradict one another or oversimplify like they will tell the difference between 2 of the 3 but leave the one ambiguous.  I was most confused about reflection.   If absorption means the electron is raised to a higher energy state then I assumed that reflection meant it didn't get raised but then I would become more confused when they said glass is clear because the electron didn't get raised at all.    So I understood the difference between absorption and transmission but what is reflection?   Most articles only covered two of the three cases.  So it appears there are 3 types of interaction bet