4 - Understanding WRONG Answers

[MikeO]

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Oh boy!

This topic could step on a few toes if I'm not careful, and it could also drag out to be a very long thread. I think I'll start off with some funny wrong answers to help keep it light.

For years I've done open mic presentations of the "Top Ten Wrong Answers" to the mirror riddle, David Letterman style. As the years past the list grew to be twenty in length. I'll post them soon.

I'm going to assume, here, that my thread "Generating the RIGHT Answer" has been thoroughly digested, so that we can eventually examine an answer offered by a Nobel Prize winning Physicist. Later in this thread I'd like to look at answers offered by some other top scholars, but that hasn't been written yet.

But first I want to do my favorite funny answer.

I've spoken the following tongue-in-cheek and with a totally straight face, using practiced theatrical vocal inflections of sincerity and conviction. It's hilarious to see how some people ALMOST buy it.



In the Southern Hemisphere, down under, mirrors behave differently. Ask anyone who's traveled to Australia or Brazil, or anywhere south of the Equator. It's often the first thing noticed in airport rest room mirrors, or in shop window glass. But by the time people get to their hotel rooms, it's impossible to miss it, and everyone takes notice. In the Southern Hemisphere, mirrors actually reverse UP and DOWN, and not left and right! So, therefore, everything balances out and there's no more riddle. ;D



Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face here!

[MikeO]

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Here's an expanded form of my Top Ten:

The Top Twenty Reasons

Why a Mirror Reverses Left and Right, But Not Up and Down

20. The parallax effect of human eyes spaced horizontally produces the reversal.



19. Because the brain has high left/right symmetry, 'but not up/down symmetry.



18. Mirrors have one interactive surface, but lenses have two and fully reverse.



17. Unlike 'state-of-the-art' mirrors, 'antique mirrors perform 'no reversal 'at all.



16. Because space is only' three 'dimensional, 'and horizontal reversal is easier.



15. Humans' conditioned by reading 'are more sensitive 'to horizontal 'reversal.



14. In the Southern 'Hemisphere '(down under)' mirrors reverse up 'and 'down.



13.'Because the'brain's left hemisphere is connected to the body's right side.



12. It also reverses up and down if you change the configuration somehow.



11. Gravity suppresses most of the visual effects of the vertical reversal.



10. Reflected' light 'is 'polarized 'more ''horizertically ''than ''vertizontally.



9. To state the riddle, 'language 'printed 'horizontally' is always used.



8. Because the silvering atoms are aligned that way at the factory.



7. It is mysterious, so the answer must be in quantum mechanics.



6. Because the earth rotates west to east, not north to south.



5. Because mirrors usually hang vertically, not horizontally.



4. For the same reason that vampires have no reflection.



3. Lying on your side, 'the reversal is head to foot.








And now the Number TWO! reason why a mirror






reverses left and right,






but not up and down:












2. It 'doesn't! ''It's merely an optical illusion.









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And finally the NUMBER ONE REASON...







Why a mirror reverses left and right, but not up and down....





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1. Because it just simply, plain DOES!






Ta DA!









A few of the above items are occasionally offered by serious thinkers as the right answer.

[MikeO]

The New York City Answer to

"Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?"

Yo! ... Becoouz it's a FRICKIN' MIRRA... DAT'S why

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BTW.... I'm from NY

[MikeO]

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...and Richard Feynman was from New York too!



Eventually I’d like to organize the wrong answers into categories, but that will take some time. For now, let’s deal with the most important category, the one that’s closest to being right.

This is the answer most thinkers offer, and it’s the one I’ve already mentioned a number of times. In it, left/right reversal is essentially denied, or refuted, or proved wrong, or in Feynman's case ignored.

In this category of wrong answer, operational definition Number One is used to show that front and back are reversed, and left/right are not, and then they pretty much end the discussion there.


***


When I was a Physics student, Richard Feynman was at the very top of the field in respectability. In my mind only Einstein, exceeded him in prestige and authority.

I still think that way today. But on this issue, I believe Feynman stepped just a little out of his field. When it comes to how people use words (like “reverse”) in ordinary language, I think his explanation had an error of omission. I find his answer lacking in that it totally denies the validity of the left-right reversal, offering no satisfaction for those who want to think that the reversal is real. He omitted the reality or the validity of operational definition Numbers Two and Three, as I presented them in my “Generating The RIGHT Answer” thread here.

Feynman offered his answer to the mirror riddle on a number of occasions. There is an account of one in James Gleick’s 1993 book “Genius,” but it’s a little unclear exactly which words are Feynman’s and which are Gleick’s paraphrasing.

Luckily, there is also a video circulating the Internet where Feynman is on camera with another one of his explanations, and I want to start there. The two are nearly identical.

I’ll first present the entire transcript of the video in blue fonts, and then comment on it piece by piece. Without the video and Feynman's body language, the transcript sounds a bit choppy, so I'll help correct that later. Here are Richard Feynman's exact words:



"If you wave this hand, then the hand in the mirror that raises is right opposite it. The hand on the East is the hand on the East. And the hand on the West is the hand on the West. And the hand that... head that’s up is up. And the feet that are down are down. Everything’s really alright.

"But what's wrong is, if this is north, your nose is to the North of the back of your head. But in the image, the nose is to the South of the back of the head. So what happens really in the image, is neither the right nor left mixed up, nor the top and bottom, but the front and back have been reversed. You see... that which is... the nose on the thing is on the wrong side of the head... if you want to... Alright?

"Now ordinarily, when we to think of the image, we think of it as another person. And we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there. It’s a psychological thing. We don’t think of the idea that the person has been squashed and push backwards, forwards with his nose in his head, because that’s not what ordinarily happens to people. A person gets to look like he looks in the mirror by walking around and facing you.

"And because people, when they walk around don’t turn their head for their feet. We leave that part alone, but they get their right and left hands swung about.. you see... when they turn around, so we say that it’s left and right interchanged. But really the symmetrical way: it’s along the axis of the mirror that things get interchanged."



Now lets work with this one paragraph at a time. I've found it helps me to follow him when I diagram on paper what he says.



“If you wave this hand, then the hand in the mirror that raises is right opposite it. The hand on the East is the hand on the East. And the hand on the West is the hand on the West. And the hand that...[he misspeaks here and starts over] head that’s up is up. And the feet that are down are down. Everything’s really alright.“

Here Feynman is going through the same paces I did in the bar mentioned in my “Generating The RIGHT Answer” thread. When the other customer was facing the bar mirror, he raised his arm that was fartherst away from me, and his image’s farthest arm was raised also. When Feynman says “Everything’s really alright,” he means there is no L/R reversal, and no U/D reversal, AND he implies that this is the reality of the situation. Yes, it is the reality of the “AS IS” operational definition Number One, but he seems to be saying that this is the only reality here, that there are no other definitions that can be thought of as real or valid.




“But what's wrong is, if this [he points forward] is north, your nose is to the North of the back of your head. But in the image, the nose is to the South of the back of the head. So what happens really in the image, is neither the right nor left [are] mixed up, nor the top and bottom, but the front and back have been reversed. You see... that which is... the nose on the thing is on the wrong side of the head... if you want to... Alright?“

When he starts out in this paragraph using the word “wrong” he means “reversed.” But when he says, “So what happens really in the image...” he again implies that outside his operational definition Number One there are no other valid definitions, and therefore no real reversal of left and right. I agree that WITHIN definition Number One this can be said, but regarding any another definitions he is silent, and he implies they don’t REALLY exist.




“Now ordinarily, when we to think of the image, we think of it as another person. And we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there. It’s a psychological thing. We don’t think of the idea that the person has been squashed and push backwards, forwards with his nose in his head, because that’s not what ordinarily happens to people. A person gets to look like he looks in the mirror by walking around and facing you.“

Here he’s saying that the F/B reversal is difficult to imagine by forward or backwards motion, but a rotation is easy to imagine. He’s right on the edge of grasping all the nuts and bolts of operational definition Number Two, but throws them away, having already dismissed that definition’s reality.




“And because people, when they walk around don’t turn their head for their feet. We leave that part alone, but they get their right and left hands swung about.. you see... when they turn around, so we say that it’s left and right interchanged. But really the symmetrical way: it’s along the axis of the mirror that things get interchanged.“

Again, he’s right on the edge of operational definition Number Three and the handstand involved with his words “their head for their feet.” But he throws this out even faster, and goes back to the edge of operational definition Number Two. He mentions the rotation again, and then belittles the reality of the L/R reversal again, demoting it from hard core reality to mere language: “...so we say that it’s left and right interchanged.”

Lastly, he returns to what he considers the only reality, the only valid operational definition, his application of operational definition Number One. He does this by saying, “But really... it’s along the axis of the mirror [Front/Back] that things get interchanged.”


***


Now we can look at James Gleick’s account (also circulating the Internet) and see that Feynman (or the Feynman/Gleick combination) comes even closer to describing operational definition Numbers Two and Three, but then throws them away, denying their reality. I’ve presented references to operational definition Numbers One, Two, and Three in the colors blue, green, and red, respectively.


This is from James Gleick’s (1993) “Genius” page 331:


"Imagine yourself standing before the mirror, he suggested, with one hand pointing east and the other west. Wave the east hand. The mirror image waves its east hand. Its head is up. Its west hand lies to the west. Its feet are down. “Everything's really all right,” Feynman said. The problem is on the axis running through the mirror. Your nose and the back of your head are reversed: if your nose points north, your double's nose points south. The problem now is psychological. We think of our image as another person. We cannot imagine ourselves 'squashed' back to front, so we imagine ourselves turned left and right, as if we had walked around a pane of glass to face the other way. It is in this psychological turnabout that left and right are switched. It is the same with a book. If the letters are reversed left and right, it is because we turned the book about a vertical axis to face the mirror. We could just as easily turn the book from bottom to top instead, in which case the letters will appear upside down."



Again working within operational definition Number One for "reverse," Feynman presents F/B reversal as hard core reality, while L/R and U/D are merely psychological or imaginary and should be thrown away as not real.

But that's not the way that a sizable portion of the population looks at it. But when operational definition Number Two flashes in their minds as they gaze into a mirror, their perception of L/R reversal is quite real.

I’ll admit that operational definition Number Three is far from this strength of reality, but for a population living in zero gravity, it too could be real.

[MikeO]

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At the end of my “Generating The RIGHT Answer” thread I ask how it is that science helps to hide the full solution to the mirror riddle. We might now also ask why it is Feynman came so close to the solution, yet missed it.

There’s a simple answer to these questions.

In the relatively small circle of professional scientists, coming to agreement on some issues is much easier than it is in the general population. Science is not only much smaller than society, it’s also more disciplined, and there’s better communication.

In society at large, and in any dictionary that accurately and fully reflects a society’s linguistic activity, words have multiple definitions. Almost any word in any medium size dictionary has multiple definitions.

This is not so well tolerated in the hard core scientific community, at least, not in the depths of the scientific doctrines. Words are cleaned up and given precise, single definitions wherever necessary. New words are invented when necessary, to avoid overtaxing already existing words. These changes are well communicated and adhered to in relatively short periods of time.

Where a word is discovered by scientists to have several meanings, the most simple and clear one is usually latched on, and the others flushed out. This is what Feynman did with “reverse” in the mirror setting. It’s just not part of science to live with crucial words having multiple meanings.

But flushing them out of society at large is not so possible. They may evolve out, but that takes a long time. In everyday life it’s the norm to be surrounded by multiple definitions, for better or for worse. Obviously, things lean toward the better if these alternate definitions are not hidden, but identified. That is what I am doing here with the word "reverse."

Since such an identification and solving the mirror riddle were not crucial to any aspect of science and technology, nor to large cultural entities, the hidden definitions of "reverse" resisted identification for a long time.


***


The way I see it, scientists are at a disadvantage to solve this riddle to the satisfaction of the common man, because scientists are not accustomed to dealing with multiple definitions in common language.

On the other hand, linguistics experts are at a disadvantage in not being as intimately familiar as physicists are with the power and usefulness of operational definitions. As any enthusiast of Einstein knows, without his pioneering use of operational definitions, there would be no Relativity Theory.

In helping to see the solution, one of my good fortunes was having just enough familiarity with both sides: that of the crisp clear world of operational definitions, and that of the murky world of multiple definitions. I can't claim to be an expert of either side, but merely have found delight in learning portions of each.

When I finally discovered the operational features of "isodirectionality" behind definition Number Two, it spurred me to go back and dig out the "as is" feature in definition Number One. Armed with the first two, definition Number Three's features eventually emerged.

Another set of lucky strokes were my humorous introduction to the riddle, the lack of stress or need in finding some answer for a highly limited technical application, the continuing emergence of entertaining comic elements in the riddle, and several decades of spare time to play with it all.

[MikeO]

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So far, I have cataloged these strategies leading to wrong answers:

A - Denial of L/R Reversal
B - False Symmetry Restoration
C - Dancing to Exhaustion
D - Changing the Configuration
E - Anger At Supposed Triviality


A - Denial of L/R Reversal - We've seen this in Feynman and it is very common.

B - False Symmetry Restoration - It's interesting how many varieties this strategy has, and absolutely amazing how many smart people are prone to quickly accept these wrong answers.

C - Dancing to Exhaustion - These are often long wandering descriptive recordings of the theorist "thinking out loud." It seems that they feel if every tile on the dance floor is covered, then the issue is resolved.

D - Changing the Configuration - This is often a subcategory to categories B and C. The standard flat, vertical mirror, and vertical object are abandoned instead of explained, usually to sieze some false symmetry restoration.

E - Anger At Supposed Triviality - This is really out there. My Top Twenty Wrong Answers #1 and #2 were seriously spoken to me with a hint of anger or impatience. The New York answer was jokingly submitted but with serious overtones. I've seen many eyes roll impatiently at my posing the question, and many who want to immediately drop the issue.