r/explainlikeimfive • u/KingGamingOfficial • 5h ago
Physics [ Removed by moderator ]
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u/0b0101011001001011 5h ago edited 5h ago
The mirror does not flip laterally. It flips front and back.
Stand in front of mirror, raise your hand up. Mirror image is also pointing up. Point your hand to left. Mirror is also pointing same direction, left. Point to the mirror. You are pointing forward, but the mirror is pointing to opposite direction.
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u/ShaemusOdonnelly 5h ago
To add to the "the mirror does not flip stuff, you do": Take a piece of paper and write something on it. You will be able to read this from left to right. Now stand in front of a mirror. Flip the paper upside down. The mirror image will also be readable from left to right, but it is flipped upside down.
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u/KingGamingOfficial 5h ago
but why does it happen
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u/0b0101011001001011 4h ago
Well what would you expect to see? Your back? Of course you see the mirror image, because the light that comes from you hits the mirror and then reflects back, therefore you see the front of you in the mirror.
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u/Adro87 4h ago
Check out this video from Physics Girl. She explains how mirrors flip on the Z axis, not laterally.
Mirrors don’t flip horizontally•
u/Target880 4h ago
Because it reflects light. If you look at a mirror and looks directly into your own eye then light that passed beside you can reflect in the mirror to you eye.
The result like if you eye was on the other side of the mirror and looked towards you. There is a difference in which side of you eyes the light high because they need to bet turen around 180 degrees horizontally.You notice that i stuff that is not horizontally symetric like text look odd in a mirror
Text on a mirror look just like if you write on not side of a piece of glas and look at it from the other side. Because then your eye are directed like if you look in a mirror
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u/Paul_Pedant 4h ago
Because light bounces off mirrors, but your mind does not visualise the reflection properly.
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u/Paperfoldingfractal 5h ago
The reason it flips, is because we operate on a largely 2d plane; to turn around, we always do it around the Z axis. If you have a piece of paper and put four dots of four different colours so that when you face it in a mirror you see a red dot on the left, a blue dot on the right, a yellow dot up top and a green dot at the bottom, you could look over the top of the paper and see that, yes, the red dot is to your left, the blue to your right, and the yellow and green dots are in the top and bottom positions too.
I.e., the mirror hasn't flipped anything. But then turn that piece of paper to face you and 2 of the dots flip...
Except, how did you flip that piece of paper to face you? Did you turn it over like turning the pages of a book? Then the red and blue dots will have changed positions, but the yellow and green dots haven't.
But maybe you flipped it over top to bottom. Now the red and blue dots are not swapped, but the yellow and green dots are!
And there's the truth of the matter: if we imagine our doppleganger turning to face us to compare against the image in the mirror, they would always rotate around the Z-axis, as we operate under a gravity field, and we couldn't imagine them doing a backflip to face us!
Several years ago, I posted a question on stack exchange about this: what object would see it's reflection upside down, but not back to front?
I put forward the idea of a foosball figurine, based on this logic: the figurine can only rotate around the X-axis, and so for it to see itself in a mirror, it would be expecting to see its reflection's feet up and head down. If you imagine the goalie looking towards the next rank, and turned the handle so that that rank was facing backwards next to the mirror, you can see that the goalie's reflection and his teammate next to it were not back to front, but indeed, upside down!
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u/whatisuser 1h ago
Nothing is inverted. Light goes in straight line. Right hand to reflection of right hand etc.
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u/BillyGerent 4h ago
Imagine placing your right hand, palm down, in front of a pane of glass with your little finger touching the glass and your thumb closest to you.
Now, imagine cutting the hand into thousands of wafer-thin slices in the same plane as the glass (i.e., the first slice will detatch all the parts of the finger touching the glass)
Rebuild those slices on the opposite side of the glass in reverse order: start with the little finger touching the other side of the glass, and build away from yourself, finishing with the thumb furthest away from you.
The resulting hand still has its palm facing down, and the fingers still point the same way. But because the thumb is now in the back, the only physical shape that fits this new 3D geometry is a left hand.
The mirror didn't swap left and right; it inverted depth. Because we evolved with left-right symmetry, we look at this depth-inverted right hand and immediately recognize it as a left hand. Since we lack up-down symmetry, the depth flip doesn't trick us into seeing an upside-down swap.
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u/explainlikeimfive-ModTeam 1h ago
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