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
15 Richest People in Media (& How They Built Their Fortunes)
The media industry is a dynamic sector that shapes our world and influences public opinion. From broadcasting to digital platforms, it connects us to news, entertainment, and information. But amidst these diverse ventures, some individuals have achieved r…
MIT Dean of Admissions, Stu Schill, says the perfect applicant doesn't exist | Homeroom with Sal
Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom live stream. For those of y’all who are new, this is something that we started doing, it feels like a lifetime ago now, almost two and a half months ago, when we started seeing sc…
Where No Grid Has Gone Before | Breakthrough
We don’t go to them and say, hey, we’ve got electricity. We’re going to bring it to you. We’re going to bring you modern entertainment that electricity provides, no. They’re coming to us and saying, we’re so far off the grid, we don’t have any electricity…
Worked example: Determining an empirical formula from percent composition data | Khan Academy
Let’s say that we have some type of a container that has some type of mystery molecule in it. So that’s my mystery molecule there, and we’re able to measure the composition of the mystery molecule by mass. We’re able to see that it is 73% by mass mercury,…
Confidence interval for hypothesis test for difference in proportions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
A university offers a certain course that students can take in person or in an online setting. Teachers of the course were curious if there was a difference in the passing rate between the two settings. Data from a recent semester showed that 80 percent o…
Animal Survival Technique - Smarter Every Day (T-5)
Hey, it’s me, Destin. We got a lot of rain here in Alabama over the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to show you an interesting survival technique I’ve found in one of the local species. Anyway, you can see all the area behind me used to be a wide ope…