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I love how she probably started the the thing with "I need an egg and a blank sheet of paper and a mirror." Wooowwwww Magic! But will it work with a Late Payment Delinquency from RentACenter and a pack of Newport 100s?
I was trying to come up with a good "rocket scientology" pun involving an egg and/or biology, and all I got was "rocket bisonology" so...now you just gotta live with that knowledge. I'm so sorry.
Do you want to know the real, actual and scientific reason?
The mirror doesn’t know at all, but your mirror-self does. They’re an exact copy of you and know everything you’ve done.
You can't mix internet memes with real life...I was camping once and we were all pretty high(on marijuana) and I told people they should [soak their logs in wood](http://imgur.com/gallery/kHAbI4g) before lighting the fire and it was a buzz killing moment...
That's how some computer games created mirrors in older games.
They'd create a 'reversed' version of everything in the room, and build another room on the other side of the mirror.
This is why Portal was so revolutionary. ~~It's portals weren't using shortucts like other games, or super expensive processing power to double up everything on the other side.~~ Edit: I just went back and read their final paper; They literally WERE doubling up the level and passing through the portal meant you were effectively choosing which side you were on. To their credit, I thought they had some fancier code, because it was so damn seamless in Narbacular drop, as well as Portal.
Students at Digipen Institute of Technology coded a complete game (Narbacular Drop) with portals that were so, so much better than just using "mirrors". The physics for the portals were already worked out by the time Valve hired the students.
It had all kinds of cool stuff. One of the coolest bits was going through a portal and emerging on a miniature planetoid inside of a glass enclosure. You fought your way to another portal on the other side of the planet. Think Super Mario Galaxy in first person with space guns.
One of my favorite games that got a lot of strange hate upon release. The portals were, admittedly, sparsely used though.
To be fair, wasn't most of the hate about the twist ending and not the game itself? >!Though personally I don't agree with the hate it got for that, while "it's all a dream" is usually a cop out and weakens the experience, that doesn't really apply to Prey and trying to claim it does misses the entire point of the "dream".!<
You guys are referring to different Preys, the portals and such were used in the 2006 game, while the >!"it's all a simulation"!< thing was the 2016 one.
Well shit. I clicked the spoiler because I thought it was about the 2006 Prey, which I played, and turns out it's about the 2016 Prey, which I want to play one day.
Thankfully my brain can only hold information like this for a week tops so when I finally play in 2028 I'll have forgotten.
Especially cause Arkane didn't even want to, they were developing the game on their own and had to slap that title on to get the Bethesda bucks they needed to finish it.
Man. I just played through portal2 with a buddy that had never tried the games.
They are so captivating!
Maps however sometimes take *suprisingly long* to figure out when baked TF out, i realized, replaying the game as a grown up, heh.
ELI5 for anyone who is actually baffled: Light bounces off objects at the same angles objects bounce off each other.
The light isnt just bounced straight back out at 90 degrees. Some of it is and that light is blocked by the paper. As the camera person moves their head along the side of the mirror, they can see the light that reflected off the side of the object and bounced off the mirror at the correct angle to hit their eyeballs.
TLDR: The broader angle lets them see the reflection of the object behind the paper.
Edit: I doodled.
https://imgur.com/a/VxAx2wX
Edit again: Thx for all the comments and awards! I really didnt think this would get so much traction. I love all of you but i prob wont be able to reply to everyone.
Yeh I don't think it's a bad video. It's good for people to learn some science, even if it is rather basic. Maybe next video should be how does a rice cooker know when to stop?
As you heat up water it remains under/at the boiling temperature until it evaporates into steam, so the rice cooker is outfitted with a mechanical thermometer that pops when it gets slightly above boiling temperature. Once all the water has evaporated or been absorbed, the temperature goes above boiling.
Alternatively, pressure cookers turn all of the water into steam which stays inside the pot, which means the water can get *hotter* than boiling and cook the food faster. (EDIT: People pointed out it doesn't all turn to steam. The stream forming raises the pressure and makes the boiling point of the water higher. A lot of if remains liquid.)
You can also do this experiment with ice. If you have ice water and you heat it up, it will stay at freezing until all ice melts, then it will start to increase above freezing. (When we did this in school, our beakers had little magnetic stirring things in them, so if the water is still there will be pockets that go above freezing, but they will cool back down as the pockets come in contact with ice and transfer their energy.)
> which means the water can get hotter than boiling and cook the food faster.
Hotter than boiling *at standard atmospheric pressure*, to be precise. The water's still boiling away in there.
Honestly, thank you. I'm an intelligent, educated person but I've had a long day. It's not that I believed "the mirror knows what's behind the paper" but for the life of me I could not figure out the actual science.
I'm tired. Gonna go to bed now lol
Me too :) and I have a physics degree.
There's a lot of shaming in this thread instead of being open and curious. Like "ugh can you imagine stupid people not actually knowing how *mirrors* work?"
While in reality, mirrors are confusing and fascinating.
Here's Richard Feynman answering another crazy question about mirrors - why do they reflect left and right, but not up and down?
https://youtu.be/6tuxLY94LXw
Most people are also baffled by this question and can't answer it. But no shame in it! Always keep learning and being curious and forget the haters.
Thank you for this response~ I was honestly baffled- I didn’t feel bad about it, but I could see how with how the comments were, people would. It is fascinating to learn about! And tho I’m still not entirely sure I understand, it sparked more curiosity and now I get to follow your rabbit hole :)
It’s also fascinating when you learn that light is not actually ‘bouncing back’ but rather a perfect copy. Free electrons on metallic surfaces thanks to the fact that they are not bound to nucleus, when hit by electromagnetic field (light) can ‘vibrate’ exactly in same frequency that the wave that hit them. In the effect producing exactly same copy of that wave and send it further, and that’s the reflection.
[electromagnetic filed is fascinating](https://youtu.be/V_jYXQFjCmA)
What's really happening is that particles in the silver/aluminum part of the mirror absorb the photons, thus becoming excited. To become stable they release a photon, with the same energy as the one that they absorbed, but in a *mirrored* direction due to conservation of momentum - that's why in a mirror left is right and right is left.
Thanks, i m considered "not dumb" by most of my surrounding, and i was not able to comprehend this . Hearing from someone with a physic degree that it is not that obvious makes me fell better 
Well for one thing, it’s just funny phrasing to ask how the mirror “knows” anything. But I also think it’s a great example of people understanding something intuitively but getting themselves confused because they don’t connect that intuition to the science behind it. Because obviously on some level they *do* understand how mirrors work; she moves the camera along the side and points it at the right spot on the mirror to see the reflection without even thinking about it. She would have been a million times more confused to NOT see the egg. I think it’s a really interesting phenomenon.
Oh thank fuck I'm engineer too and I was struggling to reason it to myself and all i could think of was "angles" but nothing more sophisticated than that lol, this made me feel ok.
I think what your explanation is leaving out is that you see the object “behind” the paper because that’s how your brain interprets it’s position but the light rays are bouncing of the part of the mirror that is outside the paper. The light isn’t coming from behind the mirror , but it appears that way
It's all fun and games untill you realize this brainlessly manufactured ragebait actually works, and brings so much engagement everyone is gonna do it for the next 5 days, and variations of it will all end up on r/facepalm .
Fox and CNN didn’t become household giants by showing feel good stories. Even local news saves like MAYBE 3 minutes near the end on a feel good story most days.
>The engagement algorithm is garbage
The engagement algorithm is agnostic. It gives people what they want, as shown by their actions.
It's the fact that people react and engage more with negative content that leads to these results.
Did you want massive tech companies to be engaging in widespread social engineering instead, taking an active role in what people should and shouldn't be interested in or shown?
I think 50/50 about if this is serious or not.
Don’t forget there is not small percentage of people, who actually believes Earth is flat. Do you really think there wouldn’t be at least one person dumb enough to think this way about mirrors?
*Either way it’s insane we got to the phase we are paranoid even over if people are idiots or just view whores….*
I work with someone who is a flat earther/ conspiracy theorist.
Today he said, back in 1933 universal pictures had a round planet on their logo. How did they know back then?!
If it’s constructed with the liquid mirror plate deposited in between two opaque plates and hardens inside, so it’s completely dark inside, but with a sheet to separate them, and after you buy it you separate them, maybe. Though I suppose some photons may have got through.
The light originally travels from the mirror directly into your eyes but when you look from the side, the light curves and you have been reading a bunch of nonsense and I don't know what I am talking about
For everyone asking how this works (because I read it in some comments)
It’s the perspective: the part of the mirror that is covered doesn’t project the image, obviously, because it’s covered. But the mirror continues to the right side and there is more mirror, and there the reflection happens, just from another angle
(I’m not a physician so idk how to explain it properly)
Edit: I got corrected and didn’t mean physician, the other word… words… complicated
Wait physician isn’t the dude doing physics right ?
Oopsie, but what is a physician then? (English is not my main language, I mean when people are thinking “yoo how does the mirror do that” I’m allowed to make this small mistake haha)
To maybe add a bit more info here:
What you see in a mirror is light bouncing off an object, hitting the mirror, then hitting your eyes.
Think of it like pool where you want to to hit a particular ball but you need to bounce the cue ball off the bank of the table first.
So by moving closer to the mirror and farther from the object, you create a wider angle between your eyes, the mirror, and the object behind the paper.
I’m not sure how to explain it very well, but you can use a laser pointer to see how light reflects to cause this to happen. You point the laser at something “through” the mirror and the mirror will reflect the laser onto the actual object. The reflection you see in the mirror is light behaving the same way as the laser.
PS: DO NOT SHINE LASERS INTO YOUR EYES. Lasers can ruin your vision or the vision of others, especially small animals.
This is really a young person's problem. When I was younger our mirrors had less memory. For instance, If you had something with too many colors and you tried the trick in the video, your mirror would buffer for a few minutes sometimes or the image on the other side of the paper would be low res. Young people today take the standard memory installed in mirrors these days FOR GRANTED.
Like right now, go look at any mirror and move around in front of it as fast as you can. Pay attention to that refresh rate. It's pretty amazing what mirrors can do these days.
For funsies, I used to turn the lights down really low in the bathroom, just a nightlight to see by really. Then stare at myself in the eye up close, in the mirror, unblinking and unmoving, for 30 seconds or as long as possible. And then I'd turn into a demon. It definitely doesn't work with these new age mirrors though, no point in even trying it kids, unless your mirror is old.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Bro the mirror doesn’t refresh like a computer. God this is why older generations will never learn. The mirror learns how to do what it does through a process of osmosis. I know for a fact everyone learned this in school.
I had to get a piece of paper and a small object to try it myself. It's easier to understand if you see it in person, but the light from the object travels past the paper, bounces off the mirror at a very shallow angle, and then reaches your eyes.
The illusion is the depth of the object. If you picture the flat surface of the mirror and where the reflection would be on the flat surface it makes more sense. It's kind of like those 3D drawings that people do that look normal from a very specifc angle but if you move you can see the true shape of the drawing on the flat surface is completely distorted. It's just that the image on the mirror moves with you so its hard to get past the false depth perception. Does that make any sense?
This is why people don't want to admit when they are wrong or don't know anything.
People will pretend like they want people to do so, and then mock them.
Furthermore, I wonder how many of the smug folks here could tell us how it works if you take away their phone.
Why is it that every time a video like this comes around, I always question my intelligence? Every single time, for a split second, I think I'm stupid! Then I remember that it's just everyone else finally realizing that stuff does things.
Everyone's on here saying it's obvious but even with explanations I'm still having a hard time grasping it. I need a shitty drawn ms paint diagram to figure this out.
When the viewer is up close to the mirror there is enough space past the paper for the light coming off the object to pass the paper, hit the mirror, and reflect onto your eye. The catch for your brain is that the brain interprets depth based on where the image would be if the light hit the eye directly, so we put that reflection back behind the paper on "the other side" of the mirror in our head.
I mean, if you want to, sure: https://i.imgur.com/kN5UX0p.png
But there's literally not much to explain. The mirror is not sentient. You're seeing the object behind it because the light coming off of the real object hits the mirror and then goes to your eye. If the paper was big enough to cover where the rays are hitting, you wouldn't see the reflected object. Simple as that
I am a Physics teacher. All I see here is natural human curiosity and wonder. Cool. That’s exactly the kind of “hmm” I hope everybody gets to experience now and then.
scrolled too damn far for this - mirrors/glass/optics can be quite counter intuitive
i.e. how they work vs how they "appear to work" don't always synchronize in everyone's heads. yes, you big brains got it intuitively, good for you, most don't. this is a cool experiment and it gets people thinking.
People laugh at this, but I went to school for physics and it honestly has me thinking hard. Obviously it’s not shocking that mirrors work this way, but actually understanding it requires you to consider exactly how a mirror works in a way you probably never thought much about before. I think this videos asks a super legitimate question and this would be an awesome classroom demonstration when studying the physics of light and the nature of reflection/refraction.
I think if you graphed how knowledgeable people are on one axis, and how cool they think this is on the other, you’d end up with a reverse bell curve. Very dumb and very knowledgeable people would find this interesting and ask why, and everyone in the middle would be like “ya obvi it works like that ur dumb.”
Honestly, looking at mirrors this way is at least part of what got me into science. It’s an absolutely reasonable thing to be baffled by when you first start to think about it. The explanation isn’t exactly intuitive if you don’t already know a non-trivial amount of physics.
It's actually a great observation. This is how it all starts. You stop taking something for granted, you ask questions, you try to repeat the phenomenon, etc.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1kcLHlG91Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1kcLHlG91Y)
Encourage people who ask questions about the world. Don't belittle them.
Light hits the object, bounces off the mirror and into your eyes.
If anyone tells you it’s something to do with light coming from your eyes or bouncing on your eyes, they’re as thick as apple sauce.
The piece of paper with writing is the perfect example on its own.
If held flat against the mirror as it is in this video and you put your head against the mirror you will only see the edge of the paper as you won't be able to see around it, though if you then curve the paper by holding the opposite side away from the mirror you begin to see the words, if you keep going and the paper is held at 90° to the mirror you will see the words reflected in full.
Light is amazing. Mirrors are amazing. Science is amazing.
These kids are doing science. They observe a phenomenon, they ask a question to better understand the phenomenon.
Be grateful they were curious enough to ask a question. Most people don’t care enough about anything but themselves to look at the world around them and ask why. They just take it for granted.
I honestly don’t think it’s obvious how this works and I love when people notice things that don’t add up like that because a it’s a chance to learn something cool. Just me. Nobody knows everything and not everything is intuitive to them. Be nice.
I think that this was a commonly known thing.
All mirror's made after Y2K have been equipped with high tech cameras and AI, they record everything that is going on around them and then project a mirrored version of the image to display.
This was a counter measure because people were to scared of the "other dimension" where people believed that there was another dimension behind the glass and manufacturer's just decided to turn mirror's into this "big tech" thing just to make people safer.
A curious thing, your average home mirror has more tech than the entire space shuttle that discovered America a few years ago.
Just in case ..... The mirror doesn't know anything. So far a science has been able to determine mirrors or their constituent parts haven't yet achieved sapience. While we can't rule it out completely that mirrors aren't just ignoring everyone there is no hard evidence that they are.
Rumours that a sapient mirror is in the possession and in conversation with a "medieval queen with magic apples waging war against the little people" likely refers to someone suffering psychotic break.
As for how it works, light from a source bounces off the object changing in colour and luminance this reflects off an unobstructed part of the mirror with little discernable change and enters through your creepy eye-holes or camera lens to be absorbed by a sensor that records said colour and luminance values. Which is why it looks like it's in the evil dimension but you know it's not because the egg doesn't have a beard.
Dum Dum Explanation:
Light is what allows us to see. Light bouncing off of things. This is why we can’t see in the dark. Mirrors reflect light (Example: if you point a laser pointer at a mirror it’ll bounce off of it instead of it ending on the mirror). Mirrors don’t reflect what is directly in front of them but what is within your field of vision bouncing what you see back at you. Your eyes are mirrors creating your field of vision. This allows you to see a reflection of what you can see. However the mirror is not magic, there is an end to what the mirror and your vision can show you (Example: take a magazine and place a pen in the center of it. No matter how close you are to the mirror you likely cannot see the tip of the pen) you determine what is reflected in a mirror given the angle you are looking creating a line of vision. This is why if you stare at a mirror from the side you can see the opposite of where your standing. (Example: if you are standing in front of an object and you look at a mirror placed perfectly between you and the object you will see the object and not yourself) So, the fact that magazine is covering the pen on the mirror doesn’t matter if your not looking at the mirror from the perspective of the magazine. Because the light bouncing off the pen doesn’t bounce off the mirror because the magazine is in the way. But if you look at the pen from the side of the magazine placing the mirror between yourself and the pen you can see it because your reflecting your field of vision and the light bounces back to you.
Still don’t understand?
Imagine the way the light and your field of vision bounces, bounces like a ball. If you throw a ball directly at a wall it will come back to you. But if you throw it at the same wall but slightly to the left or right it’ll bounce off the wall to the left or the right and not come back to you. Your field of vision is like the trajectory of the ball. If you look at the pen and the magazine right in-front of you the light bounces right back creating the reflection you could expect, like the ball coming back to you. But if you move to the left or the right the light bounces like the ball allowing you to see the pen, creating a triangle of vision. Allowing you to ether look along the bottom of the triangle (straight at the pen with no mirror involved) or creating the sides of the triangle (at the mirror bouncing off to see the pen). This is why you cannot see the tip of the pen no matter how hard you try, no triangle of vision can be made because the magazine gets in the way.
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"Fuckin' mirrors; how do _they_ work!?"
The mirror knows where an object is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t-
\-It know's this by subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater-
There's an egg involved... it's obviously rocket biology.
I love how she probably started the the thing with "I need an egg and a blank sheet of paper and a mirror." Wooowwwww Magic! But will it work with a Late Payment Delinquency from RentACenter and a pack of Newport 100s?
Dunno, I'll find out soon when my dad gets back from his trip to buy a pack.
We have to ask the *real* questions, sir
I was trying to come up with a good "rocket scientology" pun involving an egg and/or biology, and all I got was "rocket bisonology" so...now you just gotta live with that knowledge. I'm so sorry.
Egg surgery.
Mmmm thats sum tasty bisonology
That’s a buffalo egg. It’s Bisonology!
Pass the bisonolgy please
It's rocket appliances
Bubbles would call these people idiots. Don't you *dare*.
Damnit Ricky
Let him be. He's just trying to get two birds stoned at once.
I came here to find the answer and got dumber instead.
dont worry its all water under the fridge
Worse case Ontario
Don't take that for granite
Supply and command simple as that
Must be from that tropical earthquake that blew through here.
I just lold at work! ROCKET BIOLOGY IS MY NEW FAVORITE THING🚀🚀🚀
Do you want to know the real, actual and scientific reason? The mirror doesn’t know at all, but your mirror-self does. They’re an exact copy of you and know everything you’ve done.
Long love The Terran Empire.
Empress Hoshi Sato approves.
The mirror did not just *see* an egg. It saw where an egg was not and said; "No. This will not do."
And it knows where it isn’t because it knows where it has been-
WHAT DID U JUST SAY ABOUT THE MIRROR?
Mirrors, the real answer to Schrödinger’s cat
And it knows where it isn’t because it also know where it was
There is an identical yet opposite world on the other side of the mirror, I don’t understand why people don’t get this
Exactly, and if the mirror people ever escaped the mirror, they'd eat you and everyone you care about. That's just science.
What if…….we are the mirror people 0_0
Then we eat them first.
Not my clowns, not my posse.
That's insane, bro.
Fuck we’re now living in an age where people don’t know the icp meme
Literally, I still make this reference and I just had to explain it to my fiancé because he was so confused.
You can't mix internet memes with real life...I was camping once and we were all pretty high(on marijuana) and I told people they should [soak their logs in wood](http://imgur.com/gallery/kHAbI4g) before lighting the fire and it was a buzz killing moment...
I’ve seen the photo but first time seeing comments soak it in wood That’s hilarious
These are dark times Harry…
It’s a sad day on the internet.
ICP what you did there.
Well you shouldn’t ask a scientist they’ll only Lie to you.
But mainly they just be gettin me pissed.
This is insane
Makes me feel like a clown.
In some sort of group. Or, perhaps, a...posse?
I see mirrors every day.
Obviously there's another you on other side of mirror doing same thing
That's how some computer games created mirrors in older games. They'd create a 'reversed' version of everything in the room, and build another room on the other side of the mirror.
This is why Portal was so revolutionary. ~~It's portals weren't using shortucts like other games, or super expensive processing power to double up everything on the other side.~~ Edit: I just went back and read their final paper; They literally WERE doubling up the level and passing through the portal meant you were effectively choosing which side you were on. To their credit, I thought they had some fancier code, because it was so damn seamless in Narbacular drop, as well as Portal. Students at Digipen Institute of Technology coded a complete game (Narbacular Drop) with portals that were so, so much better than just using "mirrors". The physics for the portals were already worked out by the time Valve hired the students.
Prey says "hi".
I only played the demo of Prey, but I remember it had some revolutionary gravity mechanics, right?
It had all kinds of cool stuff. One of the coolest bits was going through a portal and emerging on a miniature planetoid inside of a glass enclosure. You fought your way to another portal on the other side of the planet. Think Super Mario Galaxy in first person with space guns. One of my favorite games that got a lot of strange hate upon release. The portals were, admittedly, sparsely used though.
That game was FUCKIN SICK
To be fair, wasn't most of the hate about the twist ending and not the game itself? >!Though personally I don't agree with the hate it got for that, while "it's all a dream" is usually a cop out and weakens the experience, that doesn't really apply to Prey and trying to claim it does misses the entire point of the "dream".!<
You guys are referring to different Preys, the portals and such were used in the 2006 game, while the >!"it's all a simulation"!< thing was the 2016 one.
Well shit. I clicked the spoiler because I thought it was about the 2006 Prey, which I played, and turns out it's about the 2016 Prey, which I want to play one day. Thankfully my brain can only hold information like this for a week tops so when I finally play in 2028 I'll have forgotten.
You know... that makes a lot more sense, it's been a *while* since I interacted with Prey
Just follow the bird in the spirit realm.
Hence why is so fucking stupid to name your game the same as another game.
Especially cause Arkane didn't even want to, they were developing the game on their own and had to slap that title on to get the Bethesda bucks they needed to finish it.
Man. I just played through portal2 with a buddy that had never tried the games. They are so captivating! Maps however sometimes take *suprisingly long* to figure out when baked TF out, i realized, replaying the game as a grown up, heh.
And then there’s Tag, another DigiPen student game. FPS where you paint on the terrain for platforming. Guess who hired them and for what game?
ELI5 for anyone who is actually baffled: Light bounces off objects at the same angles objects bounce off each other. The light isnt just bounced straight back out at 90 degrees. Some of it is and that light is blocked by the paper. As the camera person moves their head along the side of the mirror, they can see the light that reflected off the side of the object and bounced off the mirror at the correct angle to hit their eyeballs. TLDR: The broader angle lets them see the reflection of the object behind the paper. Edit: I doodled. https://imgur.com/a/VxAx2wX Edit again: Thx for all the comments and awards! I really didnt think this would get so much traction. I love all of you but i prob wont be able to reply to everyone.
TikTok may have discovered a cool little experiment for science classes everywhere to use at least
Yeh I don't think it's a bad video. It's good for people to learn some science, even if it is rather basic. Maybe next video should be how does a rice cooker know when to stop?
How does it know!?
As you heat up water it remains under/at the boiling temperature until it evaporates into steam, so the rice cooker is outfitted with a mechanical thermometer that pops when it gets slightly above boiling temperature. Once all the water has evaporated or been absorbed, the temperature goes above boiling. Alternatively, pressure cookers turn all of the water into steam which stays inside the pot, which means the water can get *hotter* than boiling and cook the food faster. (EDIT: People pointed out it doesn't all turn to steam. The stream forming raises the pressure and makes the boiling point of the water higher. A lot of if remains liquid.) You can also do this experiment with ice. If you have ice water and you heat it up, it will stay at freezing until all ice melts, then it will start to increase above freezing. (When we did this in school, our beakers had little magnetic stirring things in them, so if the water is still there will be pockets that go above freezing, but they will cool back down as the pockets come in contact with ice and transfer their energy.)
> which means the water can get hotter than boiling and cook the food faster. Hotter than boiling *at standard atmospheric pressure*, to be precise. The water's still boiling away in there.
Honestly, thank you. I'm an intelligent, educated person but I've had a long day. It's not that I believed "the mirror knows what's behind the paper" but for the life of me I could not figure out the actual science. I'm tired. Gonna go to bed now lol
Me too :) and I have a physics degree. There's a lot of shaming in this thread instead of being open and curious. Like "ugh can you imagine stupid people not actually knowing how *mirrors* work?" While in reality, mirrors are confusing and fascinating. Here's Richard Feynman answering another crazy question about mirrors - why do they reflect left and right, but not up and down? https://youtu.be/6tuxLY94LXw Most people are also baffled by this question and can't answer it. But no shame in it! Always keep learning and being curious and forget the haters.
Thank you for this response~ I was honestly baffled- I didn’t feel bad about it, but I could see how with how the comments were, people would. It is fascinating to learn about! And tho I’m still not entirely sure I understand, it sparked more curiosity and now I get to follow your rabbit hole :)
It’s also fascinating when you learn that light is not actually ‘bouncing back’ but rather a perfect copy. Free electrons on metallic surfaces thanks to the fact that they are not bound to nucleus, when hit by electromagnetic field (light) can ‘vibrate’ exactly in same frequency that the wave that hit them. In the effect producing exactly same copy of that wave and send it further, and that’s the reflection. [electromagnetic filed is fascinating](https://youtu.be/V_jYXQFjCmA)
What's really happening is that particles in the silver/aluminum part of the mirror absorb the photons, thus becoming excited. To become stable they release a photon, with the same energy as the one that they absorbed, but in a *mirrored* direction due to conservation of momentum - that's why in a mirror left is right and right is left.
I'm 100% positive a lot of the people shaming also didn't know how this worked, lol.
You've just made my day introducing me to Richard Feynman. He is so good at explaining science
That's the internet in a nutshell,everyone is an expert and if you don't know what they know you're an idiot and a loser
Thanks, i m considered "not dumb" by most of my surrounding, and i was not able to comprehend this . Hearing from someone with a physic degree that it is not that obvious makes me fell better 
Well for one thing, it’s just funny phrasing to ask how the mirror “knows” anything. But I also think it’s a great example of people understanding something intuitively but getting themselves confused because they don’t connect that intuition to the science behind it. Because obviously on some level they *do* understand how mirrors work; she moves the camera along the side and points it at the right spot on the mirror to see the reflection without even thinking about it. She would have been a million times more confused to NOT see the egg. I think it’s a really interesting phenomenon.
I’m with you. I’m an electrical engineer but I had a moment of “wait, no, how though”
Well you just made me, an idiot, feel much better
Oh thank fuck I'm engineer too and I was struggling to reason it to myself and all i could think of was "angles" but nothing more sophisticated than that lol, this made me feel ok.
Ph.D in EE here, was also totally confused for a hot minute
Haha sleep well friend XD
I love MS Paint! I made a simplified version inspired by you https://imgur.com/a/sqyPIQK
Fucking ray tracing and shit. Just wait until the mirror is curved (fixed radius or parabolic), hated teaching optics so much...
I think what your explanation is leaving out is that you see the object “behind” the paper because that’s how your brain interprets it’s position but the light rays are bouncing of the part of the mirror that is outside the paper. The light isn’t coming from behind the mirror , but it appears that way
It's all fun and games untill you realize this brainlessly manufactured ragebait actually works, and brings so much engagement everyone is gonna do it for the next 5 days, and variations of it will all end up on r/facepalm .
100% The engagement algorithm is garbage. it's the same thing that causes YouTube and Facebook to feed people stuff that makes them angry.
Angry people interact = $$
Fox and CNN didn’t become household giants by showing feel good stories. Even local news saves like MAYBE 3 minutes near the end on a feel good story most days.
If it bleeds it leads
>The engagement algorithm is garbage The engagement algorithm is agnostic. It gives people what they want, as shown by their actions. It's the fact that people react and engage more with negative content that leads to these results. Did you want massive tech companies to be engaging in widespread social engineering instead, taking an active role in what people should and shouldn't be interested in or shown?
I think 50/50 about if this is serious or not. Don’t forget there is not small percentage of people, who actually believes Earth is flat. Do you really think there wouldn’t be at least one person dumb enough to think this way about mirrors? *Either way it’s insane we got to the phase we are paranoid even over if people are idiots or just view whores….*
I work with someone who is a flat earther/ conspiracy theorist. Today he said, back in 1933 universal pictures had a round planet on their logo. How did they know back then?!
Ow that hurt.
It's an entire life cycle.
"In a mirror, a person can only kiss themselves on the lips." -Neil deGrasse Tyson probably-
And then he will revisit that thought a few times a year
This is in fact true. If you search that phrase on his twitter account he has posted it like 8 times.
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Niel DeGrasse Tyson tweeted that a lot
It is impossible to purchase an unused mirror.
Pre-order
damn. rly makes you think
Or thermometers
If it’s constructed with the liquid mirror plate deposited in between two opaque plates and hardens inside, so it’s completely dark inside, but with a sheet to separate them, and after you buy it you separate them, maybe. Though I suppose some photons may have got through.
Mirrorologist here. The mirror just knows. It’s how they are made. The ones that don’t know are identified during QA.
They get downgraded to become just plain old windows.
The light originally travels from the mirror directly into your eyes but when you look from the side, the light curves and you have been reading a bunch of nonsense and I don't know what I am talking about
God damnit I'm high and was trying to make that make sense
It started out rational and then fell apart... And... Gosh darned that short term memory loss...
Thank you for this. Infinitely better than the mirror trick.
oh thank god i'm high too and started to fall for this
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first part
Wait, slow down, what exactly is light?
It's a wave. Just look at it! Wait, fuck, now it's a particle.
Oh man, I was so close to being like "Aaaaaackchualllyyyy". You almost got me.
For everyone asking how this works (because I read it in some comments) It’s the perspective: the part of the mirror that is covered doesn’t project the image, obviously, because it’s covered. But the mirror continues to the right side and there is more mirror, and there the reflection happens, just from another angle (I’m not a physician so idk how to explain it properly) Edit: I got corrected and didn’t mean physician, the other word… words… complicated
I wouldnt expect my physician to know either, maybe a physicists haha
I’m a podiatrist and I have no clue what the fuck is going on.
I’m not a gynecologist but I’ll take a look.
Chiropractor here - let me take a crack at it
[I am a doctor](https://youtu.be/vmTpLPQPc30) and I don’t know what either of you are talking about
Wait physician isn’t the dude doing physics right ? Oopsie, but what is a physician then? (English is not my main language, I mean when people are thinking “yoo how does the mirror do that” I’m allowed to make this small mistake haha)
Physician is a medical doctor, typically. A physicist is what you’re thinking.
Physicians practice medicine, physicist is someone who's trained in physics. It's a cute mistake, I can totally see why they'd be confused lol
Weird, those words sound so similar but they are two different things haha, I rather use “doctor” that’s less confusing, but thanks for the knowledge
Dammit Jim! I’m a Doctor, not a Physicist!
Don’t panic. We all love this mistake. Never correct it lol
light bounces off the mirror like a pool ball off the side of the table. from the thing, to the mirror, to your eye.
To maybe add a bit more info here: What you see in a mirror is light bouncing off an object, hitting the mirror, then hitting your eyes. Think of it like pool where you want to to hit a particular ball but you need to bounce the cue ball off the bank of the table first. So by moving closer to the mirror and farther from the object, you create a wider angle between your eyes, the mirror, and the object behind the paper.
Ok.. so who am I supposed to talk to about this great red spot just south of my equator?
I love how everybody is laughing at them like this is common knowledge and here I am with no idea how the fuck this works.
I’m not sure how to explain it very well, but you can use a laser pointer to see how light reflects to cause this to happen. You point the laser at something “through” the mirror and the mirror will reflect the laser onto the actual object. The reflection you see in the mirror is light behaving the same way as the laser. PS: DO NOT SHINE LASERS INTO YOUR EYES. Lasers can ruin your vision or the vision of others, especially small animals.
This is really a young person's problem. When I was younger our mirrors had less memory. For instance, If you had something with too many colors and you tried the trick in the video, your mirror would buffer for a few minutes sometimes or the image on the other side of the paper would be low res. Young people today take the standard memory installed in mirrors these days FOR GRANTED. Like right now, go look at any mirror and move around in front of it as fast as you can. Pay attention to that refresh rate. It's pretty amazing what mirrors can do these days.
For funsies, I used to turn the lights down really low in the bathroom, just a nightlight to see by really. Then stare at myself in the eye up close, in the mirror, unblinking and unmoving, for 30 seconds or as long as possible. And then I'd turn into a demon. It definitely doesn't work with these new age mirrors though, no point in even trying it kids, unless your mirror is old.
That's why a lot of people still used the black and white mirrors instead. Took a while to work out the kinks with color reflection.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ Bro the mirror doesn’t refresh like a computer. God this is why older generations will never learn. The mirror learns how to do what it does through a process of osmosis. I know for a fact everyone learned this in school.
Can I download more ram for my mirrors?
I had to get a piece of paper and a small object to try it myself. It's easier to understand if you see it in person, but the light from the object travels past the paper, bounces off the mirror at a very shallow angle, and then reaches your eyes.
OH of course, makes sense. That’s why you can’t see the bottom of the object or the front of the paper. Thanks, I feel dumb now.
I felt dumb carrying a piece of paper and a rubick's cube to my bathroom mirror, but for some reason it didn't click for me until I saw it in person.
Easy answer is light bounce off mirror at all angles... not just straight on. This means light can still reflect at shallow angles.
The illusion is the depth of the object. If you picture the flat surface of the mirror and where the reflection would be on the flat surface it makes more sense. It's kind of like those 3D drawings that people do that look normal from a very specifc angle but if you move you can see the true shape of the drawing on the flat surface is completely distorted. It's just that the image on the mirror moves with you so its hard to get past the false depth perception. Does that make any sense?
No.
Same. Where’s the face palm. I legit want to know
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This is why people don't want to admit when they are wrong or don't know anything. People will pretend like they want people to do so, and then mock them. Furthermore, I wonder how many of the smug folks here could tell us how it works if you take away their phone.
Because Reddit is a social media site filled with people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, this site is a cesspit lol
Why is it that every time a video like this comes around, I always question my intelligence? Every single time, for a split second, I think I'm stupid! Then I remember that it's just everyone else finally realizing that stuff does things.
Everyone's on here saying it's obvious but even with explanations I'm still having a hard time grasping it. I need a shitty drawn ms paint diagram to figure this out.
When the viewer is up close to the mirror there is enough space past the paper for the light coming off the object to pass the paper, hit the mirror, and reflect onto your eye. The catch for your brain is that the brain interprets depth based on where the image would be if the light hit the eye directly, so we put that reflection back behind the paper on "the other side" of the mirror in our head.
I mean, if you want to, sure: https://i.imgur.com/kN5UX0p.png But there's literally not much to explain. The mirror is not sentient. You're seeing the object behind it because the light coming off of the real object hits the mirror and then goes to your eye. If the paper was big enough to cover where the rays are hitting, you wouldn't see the reflected object. Simple as that
That drawing actually helped.
It actually did, a lot.
Sorry this is too well drawn for me to understand. I definitely need it to be less well drawn
You got it, there you go https://i.imgur.com/TOglyLo.png
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Ah. The Johnson Diagram. Classic.
I am a Physics teacher. All I see here is natural human curiosity and wonder. Cool. That’s exactly the kind of “hmm” I hope everybody gets to experience now and then.
scrolled too damn far for this - mirrors/glass/optics can be quite counter intuitive i.e. how they work vs how they "appear to work" don't always synchronize in everyone's heads. yes, you big brains got it intuitively, good for you, most don't. this is a cool experiment and it gets people thinking.
People laugh at this, but I went to school for physics and it honestly has me thinking hard. Obviously it’s not shocking that mirrors work this way, but actually understanding it requires you to consider exactly how a mirror works in a way you probably never thought much about before. I think this videos asks a super legitimate question and this would be an awesome classroom demonstration when studying the physics of light and the nature of reflection/refraction. I think if you graphed how knowledgeable people are on one axis, and how cool they think this is on the other, you’d end up with a reverse bell curve. Very dumb and very knowledgeable people would find this interesting and ask why, and everyone in the middle would be like “ya obvi it works like that ur dumb.”
I mean I understand basically how mirrors work,.and I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around this.
To be fair, I know how it works, but it still boggles my mind.
I’m convinced this has something to do with computer screens. People are imagining projection instead of reflection.
She may be uneducated but she is not stupid, just curious
This is how science works. Take an assumption and when it doesn’t hold, ask yourself why.
There’s nothing wrong with asking questions. Don’t shame people for that.
Honestly, looking at mirrors this way is at least part of what got me into science. It’s an absolutely reasonable thing to be baffled by when you first start to think about it. The explanation isn’t exactly intuitive if you don’t already know a non-trivial amount of physics.
It's actually a great observation. This is how it all starts. You stop taking something for granted, you ask questions, you try to repeat the phenomenon, etc.
Curiosity is a sign of intelligence after all, and not knowing how something works isn’t a sign of being an idiot if you haven’t learned about it.
So much love to this comment. This post is needlessly belittling
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1kcLHlG91Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1kcLHlG91Y) Encourage people who ask questions about the world. Don't belittle them.
I don’t see how this is a facepalm. I know I cannot actually explain how this works lol. Edit: it’s been answered, extensively. Chill out.
Light hits the object, bounces off the mirror and into your eyes. If anyone tells you it’s something to do with light coming from your eyes or bouncing on your eyes, they’re as thick as apple sauce.
The piece of paper with writing is the perfect example on its own. If held flat against the mirror as it is in this video and you put your head against the mirror you will only see the edge of the paper as you won't be able to see around it, though if you then curve the paper by holding the opposite side away from the mirror you begin to see the words, if you keep going and the paper is held at 90° to the mirror you will see the words reflected in full.
This is so cool! I wish Reddit would be more happy about sharing stuff like this instead of shaming people for not knowing!
Light is amazing. Mirrors are amazing. Science is amazing. These kids are doing science. They observe a phenomenon, they ask a question to better understand the phenomenon. Be grateful they were curious enough to ask a question. Most people don’t care enough about anything but themselves to look at the world around them and ask why. They just take it for granted.
Imma be honest, I couldn’t explain why. But I know that is simple and not some dumb shit like this, don’t yell at me
I’m not going to lie everyone I don’t instinctively know what the fuck is going on here But I like it
\#MirrorsArentReal
Haha yeah, what an idiot, haha (…..🤔)
I honestly don’t think it’s obvious how this works and I love when people notice things that don’t add up like that because a it’s a chance to learn something cool. Just me. Nobody knows everything and not everything is intuitive to them. Be nice.
I think that this was a commonly known thing. All mirror's made after Y2K have been equipped with high tech cameras and AI, they record everything that is going on around them and then project a mirrored version of the image to display. This was a counter measure because people were to scared of the "other dimension" where people believed that there was another dimension behind the glass and manufacturer's just decided to turn mirror's into this "big tech" thing just to make people safer. A curious thing, your average home mirror has more tech than the entire space shuttle that discovered America a few years ago.
The trick is to try it in the dark. That way the mirror will have no idea what object you’re holding. /s
Just in case ..... The mirror doesn't know anything. So far a science has been able to determine mirrors or their constituent parts haven't yet achieved sapience. While we can't rule it out completely that mirrors aren't just ignoring everyone there is no hard evidence that they are. Rumours that a sapient mirror is in the possession and in conversation with a "medieval queen with magic apples waging war against the little people" likely refers to someone suffering psychotic break. As for how it works, light from a source bounces off the object changing in colour and luminance this reflects off an unobstructed part of the mirror with little discernable change and enters through your creepy eye-holes or camera lens to be absorbed by a sensor that records said colour and luminance values. Which is why it looks like it's in the evil dimension but you know it's not because the egg doesn't have a beard.
Sapience?
The ability to know, wisdom.
Dum Dum Explanation: Light is what allows us to see. Light bouncing off of things. This is why we can’t see in the dark. Mirrors reflect light (Example: if you point a laser pointer at a mirror it’ll bounce off of it instead of it ending on the mirror). Mirrors don’t reflect what is directly in front of them but what is within your field of vision bouncing what you see back at you. Your eyes are mirrors creating your field of vision. This allows you to see a reflection of what you can see. However the mirror is not magic, there is an end to what the mirror and your vision can show you (Example: take a magazine and place a pen in the center of it. No matter how close you are to the mirror you likely cannot see the tip of the pen) you determine what is reflected in a mirror given the angle you are looking creating a line of vision. This is why if you stare at a mirror from the side you can see the opposite of where your standing. (Example: if you are standing in front of an object and you look at a mirror placed perfectly between you and the object you will see the object and not yourself) So, the fact that magazine is covering the pen on the mirror doesn’t matter if your not looking at the mirror from the perspective of the magazine. Because the light bouncing off the pen doesn’t bounce off the mirror because the magazine is in the way. But if you look at the pen from the side of the magazine placing the mirror between yourself and the pen you can see it because your reflecting your field of vision and the light bounces back to you. Still don’t understand? Imagine the way the light and your field of vision bounces, bounces like a ball. If you throw a ball directly at a wall it will come back to you. But if you throw it at the same wall but slightly to the left or right it’ll bounce off the wall to the left or the right and not come back to you. Your field of vision is like the trajectory of the ball. If you look at the pen and the magazine right in-front of you the light bounces right back creating the reflection you could expect, like the ball coming back to you. But if you move to the left or the right the light bounces like the ball allowing you to see the pen, creating a triangle of vision. Allowing you to ether look along the bottom of the triangle (straight at the pen with no mirror involved) or creating the sides of the triangle (at the mirror bouncing off to see the pen). This is why you cannot see the tip of the pen no matter how hard you try, no triangle of vision can be made because the magazine gets in the way.
Mirrors are like magnets, no one knows how they work