Knowledge, Information and Experienced
10 Crazy Facts About Mirrors:
We’re all familiar with mirrors—we look into them every day. But mirrors aren’t just for checking your appearance or looking for cars behind you when you’re driving. There are some crazy things mirrors can do, including keeping wormholes stable enough to travel through time. Mirrors and phantom limbs can help us learn about the brain, and mirrors can also allow us to measure the distance to the Moon. Here are the 10 craziest things about mirrors.
1. Mirrors And Time – We all know that you can travel through time in a wormhole, right? The only trouble is that wormholes have a tendency to collapse, which prevents anything from passing through them. However, help is at hand, with a simple pair of mirrors. All you need is two uncharged mirrors (or metallic plates) in a vacuum, placed a few micrometers apart—make sure there is no external electromagnetic field. Now comes the Casimir effect, which is a physical force arising from a quantized field between the two mirrors. This quantum electrodynamic force produces a mass-negative region of space-time between the mirrors, which could stabilize a wormhole, and allow faster-than-light travel.
2. Neuroscientists are a wacky bunch, but, amazingly, experiments using mirrors on patients with phantom limbs have allowed researchers to learn a lot about how the brain works. Using a “smoke and mirrors” style optical illusion, researchers placed mirrors vertically on a table, and used them to reflected the patient’s intact limb—say a hand. This effectively superimposed the reflection of the intact hand onto the side of the phantom limb, so that—to the patient—it looked like they had both hands. Weirdly, when the intact hand was moved, the patient felt the same movement in the phantom hand—even if the hand had been missing, and no movement had been felt for more than 10 years. When the intact hand was touched, the patient also felt the sensation in the phantom limb. By repeating the procedure several times, some patients felt their phantom limb disappear.
3. Mirrors Cause – Hallucinations strange illusion is conjured up when you stare at your reflection in a mirror. It’s an old Halloween trick that modern science is starting to investigate. Try it for yourself. Sit in a darkened room, about a meter (3 ft) away from a mirror, and gaze at the reflection of your face for about 10 minutes. Keep the lighting as dark as you can, while still being able to see your reflection. At first, you will find that there are small distortions in your face in the mirror. Then, gradually, after several minutes, your face will begin to change more dramatically, and look more like a waxwork, like the face doesn’t belong to you.
4. Can Everyone Recognize Themselves In A Mirror? Most of us take it for granted that we will recognize ourselves in a mirror. Yet, it seems that not everyone can pass the mirror mark test for self-recognition. Scientists use a method of marking the face or body, then observing what the subject does in front of a mirror, to test for signs that they recognize themselves and try to rub off the mark.
5. Animals That Have Mirror Self-Recognition KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA Just as many humans do not pass the current mirror self-recognition test, many animals fail it too. Could that mean that certain animals are able to pass a different test for recognizing their own reflection? Some researchers think so. For example, some elephants failed the marking method for mirror self-recognition, but showed obvious self-recognition behaviors, such as repetitive movements that showed a connection to their reflection. Gorillas also failed the test, and were thought not to have mirror self-recognition. The arguments are flying as to the effectiveness of the marking method, and it could be that many other species are much more self-aware than we give them credit for. Animals that pass the traditional mirror self-recognition test include chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas, elephants, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, and European magpies.
6. Cube Reflector Mirror –
Photo credit: Claudio Tavares
The Moon is, on average, 384,403 kilometers (238,857 mi) away from us on Earth. We know this so accurately thanks to mirrors. The distance to the moon varies, because of its elliptical orbit around the Earth.
These measurements have even been used to test Einstein’s theory of relativity.
7. Acoustic Mirrors – Mirrors Can Also Reflect Sound
Photo credit: Paul Russon
Mirrors are not just for gazing at your reflection. Mirrors can actually reflect sound as well as light. Mirrors that reflect sound waves are known as “acoustic mirrors,” and were used in Britain during World War II to detect certain sound waves coming from enemy aircraft. This was before the development of radar. Several were built around the coast of Britain, and are still standing today—the most famous ones are at Denge, near Dungeness, Kent.
8. Atomic Mirror – Amazingly, mirrors can also reflect matter. Such mirrors are known in physics as “atomic mirrors.” An atomic mirror reflects atoms of matter just as a conventional mirror reflects light. They use electromagnetic fields to reflect neutral atoms, although some just use silicon water. The reflection from an atomic mirror is essentially a quantum reflection of a wave of matter, and works for reflecting neutral atoms that are moving slowly.
9. True Mirrors – It’s actually a myth that a mirror reverses your image—your reflection is not flipped. What you see is the left-hand side of your face on the left of the mirror, and the right-hand side on the right, giving the illusion that your reflection is reversed. However, a non-reversing mirror, or “true mirror,” was developed. It allowed the user to see their reflection as others saw them—primarily for applying cosmetics.
10. Splitting Light With A Mirror – Mirrors can not only reflect light, sound, and matter, but they can also split light beams. Many beam splitters use mirrors, and are commonly used in many scientific instruments, including telescopes. A basic beam splitter is a cube, made from two glass prisms connected at their base.
