yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Mirrors And The Fourth Dimension


less than 1m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Mirrors do not show us a fourth dimension, but they do show us what a fourth dimension could do to us. First, notice that some things are the same as their mirror image, but some things are not. These two shapes are similar, but they cannot be rotated to look identical, to be superimposable on each other. This is called being chiral.

A chiral shape and its mirror image are called anatomorphs. These two shapes are anatomorphs in two dimensions. No amount of two-dimensional rotations will ever make them superimposable. To do that, I'll need to smash one of them inside out, turn it into its own mirror image, or rotate it in a third, higher dimension.

If I place a sticker here and face that side away from me, notice that the mirror inverts the object, just like a rotation through a higher dimension. The side of the real object that's furthest from me becomes the side of the virtual object that's closest to me. So, what would I look like if I was rotated around a plane in a fourth spatial dimension and then brought back? I would look like that.

More Articles

View All
Cosine: The exact moment Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist
Because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and so I went to Princeton. I was a really good student. As I pointed out already, I got eight pluses on almost everything. I was in the honors physics track, which starts out with, you know, 100 students, a…
A collection of my best advice on meditation
I’m so glad that some of our conversations are on meditation. I have a number of questions that I get on meditation. Uh, what type? There are just many, many, many types of meditation, and I suppose they’re probably almost all good. I’ve only experienced…
How to sell private jets to billionaires...
This is a very hectic day in the life of a corporate jet broker. I came into the office at 7:30. I was about to get ready for an important meeting I had at 10:00 when I got a call from George Ganopoulos from Lux Aviation. “You’re kidding! Client, we just…
Controlling a plane in space
Hello everyone! So I’m talking about how to find the tangent plane to a graph, and I think the first step of that is to just figure out how we control planes in three dimensions in the first place. What I have pictured here is a red dot representing a po…
Impedance
Now we’re going to talk about the idea of impedance. This is a really important idea in electronics, and it’s something that comes from the study of AC analysis. AC analysis is where we limit ourselves to inputs to our circuits that look like sinusoids, c…
Mapping the Mysterious Islands Near San Francisco | Best Job Ever
Ross and I went out to the ferons to capture conservation stories and map The Refuge. The Falon National Wildlife Refuge is the largest seabird nesting colony in the lower 48 states, and it’s also an incredibly important breeding ground for marine mammals…