By Paul Weiser
A question that has always intrigued me is the old mirror conundrum: When you look at yourself or a line of text in a mirror you, or the writing, appear reversed left-to-right but not top-to-bottom. What's going on here - a trick of light, gravity, or something more significant?
First off, there's no science-fiction or conspiracy involved: my mirror, like yours, is plate glass with an opaque backing. No wires, cameras, or microprocessors... but, oddly, when you look at yourself on video, the image has its watch on the same wrist as you do (and writing is readable). In the mirror, it's on the wrong wrist. How can the simple mirror perform this complex reversal with no brain? (Incidentally, video is completely useless for shaving!)
Can gravity be a factor? Hardly. We know gravity bends light, but not to this extent - like most things at human scale, Newtonian optics and mechanics predominate. Besides, if you take the trouble to lie on your side and view your image in a mirror, it's still reversed left-to-right... and if you hold up writing, it's still unreadable though its normal breadth dimension is now top-to-bottom. Such perversity!
And here is the secret: when you roll two dice you expect (unless you know) that the numbers 2 through 12 will appear with equal frequency - they don't, but that's because you're performing the entirely mental and physically irrelevant calculation of adding the spots. The mirror simply reflects, but you are making the completely internal and very complex mental transformation of expecting a person, or writing, that faces you to be rotated 180 degrees.
The mirror, the dice simply are. Their seeming complexity and unexpected perversity result from our own mental gymnastics: we are, as some Indian tribes explain the origin of evil, wrapped around ourselves.
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