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Why do mirrors reflect right and left?
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Why do mirrors reflect right and left?
9,725 Views | (11 votes, avg: 3.27)
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Because the reflection is bouncing back to its source. If you were to turn around to align yourself with the source point you would actually switch right to left because you would be facing the opposite direction
Well, take a mirror, lay it flat on a table, hold a card with the word “mirror” over it and take a look at the reflection. You will find that the left and right remain unchanged (though top and bottom are reflected). Hence it also depends on the plane of the mirror.
When you stand in front of a mirror, you can see that right hand becomes left and vv, but not the case with the face moving from up to down. This is because of relative image against which you are comparing and that is the face in this case. But if we take a different frame as mentioned by arpan it may result up and down.
Human lives on the earth, which has the gravity. Further away from the ground surface is UP. Closer to the ground surface is DOWN. The movements of human-beings are restricted to the ground surface — plane motions. Therefore, UP-DOWN is the axis for human to distinct right and left. When reflected by mirrors, the axis is the same in the mirrors, while the right and left is reversed.
Human eyes are symmetric to the UP-DOWN axis.
I would argue that a mirror cannot reflect just right or just left. It would HAVE to reflect left AND right. If you were to invert yourself, or much more easily the mirror, then your right and left change and if the mirror reflects one way it reflects both. Right and left is relative to the orientation of the person/object that is in front of the mirror.
The answer is in using the proper terms. The mirror inverts the direction of rotation and it does not invert the direction of stright movement.
Mirrors reflect only light. Stand in front of a mirror, in full darkness, with no light, and ask the question again.
I actually came accross this puzzle in a novel I was reading…Mirrors actually do not invert images left and right.They simply show you what they see.
Left and right are human conventions and are defined in relation a persons “direction of travel” (that’s why we say things like “to the left, if you are facing the sea”).
Mirror actually preserve the up/down and sideways axis.
What they do invert is the axis that is orthogonal to the plane defined by the mirror surface. This happens to be the “direction of travel” of the observer.
Thus, although the up/down and sideways axis are preserved. Inverting the front/back axis also inverts the left/right convention.
It is because of our eyes. They are left to right hence we see our image right and left.
Had our eyes been up down we would have seen our image as upside down.
It is just simple…
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