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
Rethinking Our Relationship With Water | National Geographic
It’s hard to believe the world could ever run out of fresh water. Even though we live on a blue planet, only about three percent of Earth’s water is fresh. Of that, only one percent can be used as drinking water, and that is threatened by climate change a…
How to Stop Taking Things So Personally
Miscommunication is a daily occurrence. Oftentimes, we aren’t doing a very good job when it comes to interpreting what people say or understanding the reasons why they say it. A common mistake is creating a story around a specific situation, which revolve…
Primary Elections Explained
Primary elections are how political parties in the United States pick their strongest candidate to run for president. The parties do this by holding mini-elections in each of the states, and the candidates with the most votes from these elections become t…
Unlocking the Eyes | Explorer
[Music] What boggles my mind about the eye is everything. But I’m really, really excited by the advances in technology made possible by research, not just into the eye, but into how natural selection caused it to be what it is. The next few decades are go…
40 AI Founders Discuss Current Artificial Intelligence Technology
What is the most maybe unexpected way that you use AI in your regular life? Yeah, I don’t know if I should say this, but uh, writing speeches for weddings. Yeah, we both set our answering machines to our boy’s spot. “Hey, how’s it going?” “Oh, it’s th…
Modeling with basic exponential function
There are 170 deer on a reservation. The deer population is increasing at a rate of 30% per year. Write a function that gives the deer population P of t on the reservation T years from now. All right, let’s think about this. And like always, pause this …