There's an oldish joke, I can't remember where I came across it first, that runs as follows.
Q. What happens to naughty sunbeams?
A. They get sent to prism. But they only get a light sentence.
I was thinking about this joke and the fact that the prism refracts the light, and I wondered about the word origin of the word refraction. I looked it up and was quite surprised. It seems to go back to Latin refract, the stem of the past tense of refringere, 'to break or deflect', and be related to fragment and fraction.
The Online Etymology Dictionary goes further and traces it back to a Proto-Indo-European root *bhreg-, 'to break' and that is also the origin of 'break', which is thus a word that has changed little in more than 5,000 years.
Even more surprisingly the same root is probably connected to 'breach', 'brake' and 'brick', as well as a host of other words, see https://www.etymonline.com/word/frangible#etymonline_v_11872.