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
Using specific values to test for inverses | Precalculus | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to think about function inverses a little bit more, or whether functions are inverses of each other. Specifically, we’re going to think about can we tell that by essentially looking at a few inputs for the functions and a few ou…
Fractional powers differentiation | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So we have ( H(x) ) is equal to ( 5x^{1⁄4} + 7 ) and we want to find what is ( H’ ) of 16, or what is the derivative of this function when ( x ) is equal to 16. And like always, pause this video and see if you can figure it out on your own. All right, w…
Excavating a Burial Painting | Lost Treasures of Egypt
It’s a breathtaking moment for me in the sands of the necropolis. Bassem has made an incredible discovery. So what we are looking here is one fragment of a mummy portrait that is painted with the wax, the encaustic technique. Greek artists from Alexandri…
How to Reduce the Pain of Life | Arthur Schopenhauer
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that nature is driven by an all-encompassing force, which he called Will, or more specifically, the Will-To-Live. This force is unconscious, aimless, and blind, and gives rise to an in…
Water potential worked example
A zucchini squash was peeled and cut into six identical cubes. After being weighed, each cube was soaked in a different sucrose solution for 24 hours in an open container and at a constant temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. The cubes were then removed fro…
Ray Dalio and Elliot Choy on Why Money Shouldn't be an End Goal
Or do you ever see people around you that make the mistake of thinking that money is the actual goal? Then they maybe got into it aiming to achieve freedom or these other things, security. But then they are just so caught up in moving that goal post that …