How Does a Non-Reversing Mirror Work?

hey everybody today i'm going to be showing you what it looks like to look in a true mirror so have you ever wondered what you look like to other people for example if you could walk up to yourself and meet yourself what would it actually look like well you could try to simulate this just by looking in a normal mirror but that doesn't really simulate what you look like to other people because you're actually seeing the mirror image of yourself so everything that's on the right side is on the left side and everything that's on the left side is on the right side so what do you actually look like in real life in order to see that you would need a different kind of mirror a mirror that doesn't flip the image a true mirror well if you've noticed while i'm talking i'm actually looking in a mirror right now but notice that the words on my shirt aren't flipped you can see that i've written the action lab on this paper here but look what happens when i flip it around the action lab still for example here's the sign again but you can look at it through the regular mirror and the true mirror at the same time you can see in the regular mirror it's the mirror image of the words and in the true mirror it's the actual words how you would see them as if i was a different person holding up a sign to you so this mirror is not flipping the image to be the mirror image it's not acting like a mirror anymore it's showing myself what i would look like in real life in real time with real lighting around me and it's weird so for the first time in my life i'm seeing myself like other people see me now this is one of the reasons a lot of people don't like what they look like in pictures because they're so used to seeing themselves as a mirror image that they don't like it when they see themselves not as a mirror image as in a picture so typically the only time we see ourself in real time in real life is in the mirror and so we become accustomed to believing that that's what we actually look like when in reality we're the mere image of that and so when we actually see ourselves in real time in real life not as a mirror image it seems weird the biggest thing that we'll notice is the asymmetries that we become accustomed to for example when i first looked into the true mirror i didn't like what i saw the first thing i noticed is that this ear sticks out a little bit more than the other and my nose is crooked but why didn't i notice that before well it's because i've become so used to just seeing what i look like in a regular mirror that i became accustomed to the asymmetries in my face so how does the true mirror work how is it that in a regular mirror i'm seeing these words flipped but in the true mirror i'm not well to understand this we have to first understand how a regular mirror works why does a regular mirror flip the image in the first place so let's try to understand how a normal mirror flips stuff for example let me hold up an arrow in front of this mirror so so far it doesn't seem like it's flipping anything the arrow's pointing to the right so is the mirror the arrow's pointing up so is the mirror points to the left so as the mirror points down so is the mirror so this is weird if the arrow is always pointing in the same direction in the mirror as it is in real life then how is it flipping these words around well the answer to that is that mirrors don't flip images but they reflect light so the mirror isn't actually flipping anything it's just reflecting light that's bouncing off of it for example the green light that's coming off this t here is hitting the mirror and going back to the camera but why does it look flip still well the reason is is because the light that's being bounced off of it is already flipped and what do i mean by that is because i'm holding it flipped for example if i remove the white from it and just show you the marker notice that it's flipped so the mirror didn't flip anything all it did was reflect what i'm showing it and this is the light that i'm showing it it's already flipped for example if i turn the paper around and face the camera and then remove the back white paper then you can see that it's not flipped in the mirror either because i'm just showing it what i'm seeing so the reason that normal mirrors appear to flip something is not because they're actually flipping anything but it is because when you show something to a mirror you have to turn it away from you so if i don't turn this paper around i can't show you on the mirror what's on it so i have to flip it and turn it towards the mirror and now once i've flipped it i've flipped the image so the mirror didn't flip anything you're the one that flipped it by showing it to the mirror and as the physics girl mentions in one of her videos about the subject that's why mirrors flip only horizontally and not vertically for example let's say i wanted to show the mirror this paper but instead of flipping it like this i just flip it like this then i'm showing it to the mirror but i've flipped it upside down now so now it would seem like the mirror actually flipped these words when of course it was just us that flipped these words now even though the mirror isn't the thing doing the flipping you're the thing doing the flipping to show it to the mirror the result is still the same something that you see in a mirror looks like a mirror image and it doesn't look like it would look like if you're looking at it in real life and so what that means is that in order to get something to look like it would look like in real life you need something that does flip the image so you need a mirror that flips actually so for example notice how in the true mirror when i have an arrow pointing to the left in the mirror it shows it pointing to the right and the reason for that is because it's supposed to look like you're looking at someone showing you an arrow for example let me stand up and walk around keep holding this arrow out in front of me and you'll notice that now it looks like it's pointed that same direction as before so we see that in order for the true mirror to work correctly it has to reflect the opposite of what i'm doing in real life so that it looks as if another person's doing it instead of me so let me show you how it actually does that so you can see when i shine a laser what's actually happening with the true mirror you can see that it's reflecting off of it shining the beam so that it comes out the other side so whatever i do with the laser here you can see it moves the beam on the opposite side so the result of this is it looks like there's actually two people shining this laser beam you can see that me right here is shining the laser beam on the back of the garage and then the person in the mirror is shining it behind me here so the way that the true mirror works is just through two mirrors that are at right angles to each other so it reflects off one and then reflects off of the other so it has a double reflection and because of the double reflection it reverses the initial flip that the first mirror caused but the clever thing about the true mirror is how they get this right angle so perfect that you can't even see it and you can adjust it here so that you don't see the line whatsoever and the result of this is a true mirror to show you what you look like to other people whether you like it or not now thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet and hit the bell so you can be notified when my latest video comes out and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 580,971

Rating: 4.958498 out of 5

Keywords: true mirror, reflection, how do mirrors work, true reflection, the action lab, action lab, true mirror vs regular mirror, true mirror reactions, non-reversing mirror

Id: x2owiSx0biU

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020