Post Miscellaneous COMMENTS Here

[MikeO]

Welcome

[Eric F]

You can watch a reflection of a football game in a mirror and it doesn't really matter but if you watch a baseball game the batter appears to run to third base.

[MikeO]

Hi Eric,

Yes, the gridiron seems unaffected, while the diamond goes backwards.

However, you'll notice that quarterbacks normally viewed as right-handed, throw left-handed in mirror reflected football.

[MikeO]

;D

[Kathy]

um......the only thing I really understand here is these faces......

[MikeO]

Hi Kathy,


They are construction zone debris.


Careful. Traffic fines are double in construction zones.

[Kathy]

Well then let me ask you since you understand my head to some degree........

When you are on the opposite side of the world heading north is east west and west east based on the person in the USA heading north at the same time?

And if that is just plain goofy to ask remember I qualified myself already. ;D

[MikeO]

Hi Kathy,

It's nice to meet you. I had originally planned on removing those smiley faces, but forgot. I put them there so that I could transfer them to my word processor where I do most of my typing.

Now that they've become a topic of conversation I'll have to leave them there as "organizational artifacts."

But I wouldn't classify your question as goofy... not that there's anything wrong with that...

Maybe you will be able to see the answer better if you draw it out on paper. I find that helpful. But let me try answering it with words first.

The ideas of East and West are not set up to have absolute meanings. They work well for small areas of the Earth, but not for the big picture of the entire glober or outer space.

East is a relative direction for just one small patch of the Earth and not an absolute direction that pertains to the entire globe.

A car traveling East in your neighborhood would be going West relative to a patch of the Earth 180 degrees on the other side of the globe, like in India or China.

If you’re drawing this out, you might see that the same moving car, relative to a patch on the Earth only 90 degrees or half way around the globe, would be going NEITHER East nor West, but vertically up or down.

Up and down are also relative terms. Up in the USA is down for India and China.

Speed is also usually a relative term also. If you are in a fast moving car going 60 mph down the road, you may only be going 5 mph relative to someone in a slower lane.

So far all these things are RELATIVE terms, in that they are different to different people. But the idea of North and South is a little more of an absolute term, but even it can be tricky.

May 22, 2011 6:02:09 GMT -5 @Kathy said:

When you are on the opposite side of the world heading north is east west and west east based on the person in the USA heading north at the same time?

I'd say the answer to your question is "Yes" and that East and West get swapped for this situation.

Does this help?

[Kathy]

Absolutely!

Which brought to mind what a small spec of space we occupy in the realm of outside our 4x4.

Now back to talking about stuff that flies over my head to some degree.

[MikeO]

Airplanes fly over my head.

...and that's a GOOD thing! ;D

[Kathy]

I think between the few avenues I've had to know you over the years I am finally certain that what goes on inside your head looks different than what goes on inside mine.

Yours has words and symbols and numbers. While mine has....well um.....I don't know how to describe it.

[MikeO]

So isn't it marvelous that we can communicate, at least a little, IN SPITE of the differences!

[Kathy]

yup

[juan]

Congratulations! You've managed to explain perfectly that...ermmm.. "phenomenon" of the mirror reversal paradox. Very clear, indeed. Those two stategies people often use to compare things are a good way to look at the so-called paradox. The same goes for the example of the gymnast that puts himself upside-down to become facing the same side his image is; it makes people notice how mistaken that strategy is, in its foundings / logical grounds.

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I'd like to add some ideas i think can be also helpful here.

One thing I think might be helpful is to notice that we take reference points when we think about an axis. In the environment this is much easier to see in the vertical axis: ground-sky. That's because the Earth's surface is basically a plane of symmetry, which is the surface itself, dividing the space in which we stand into "up" (the sky-towards end of the vertical axis) and "down" (the ground-towards end of the vertical axis).
Our body also has reference points in the axis perpendicular to our transversal plane, that is, the vertical axis: head to the top, feet to the bottom. Maybe this is why people perfectly notice that there's no inversion in the vertical axis. The head is still pointing to the sky.

The coronal of frontal plane divides our body in two, front and back, and we also have points of reference in our body, as our face is only to the front, our back is only to the back, and so on. But the same doesn't happen with any part of the planet we're standind in, unless we have objects of reference. But, in general, the front-back difference is not so clear on the planet's surface, not as the ground-sky opposition (also enhanced by gravity!); we couldn't even tell where the frontal plane is (and we take the mirror as an answer). And if there's some mountain on our back that has no counterpart ahead of us.... we often look at the mirror with our front. So the mountain is also reflected, and we might think there's no front-back inversion because in the mirror's image the other self also has the mountain behind them. The remedy for this would be to think about ACTUAL mountains or any other reference, beyond the matter that composes the mirror; something that is present behind our back, and absent beyond the mirror. And then take the mirror's borders to establish the frontal plane, but using the references of the real world. I guess because of this - the mirror's most common position - people don't see the obvious inversion in the front-right axis (perpendicular to the mirror's surface, actually).

Finally, the sagital plane, the one that divides us into our left and right halves. We are, generally speaking, symetric here. Some of our internal organs aren't, but as we don't see them, they don't change this fact. Mammals have bilateral symetry, that is, tissues develop with the same pattern each side of the sagital plane. In Anatomy we talk about inner-outer, more than left-right, precisely because of this symmetry: "inner" means closer to the body's midline, and "outer" means further away from it. In a way, Anatomy studies half bodies, with absolute references for the axis perpendicular to the transversal plane: inner (towards the vertebrae) and outer (towards the shoulder). But, back to the entire body... we don't have some cardiac protuberance on the left of the torso, nor a liver protuberance to its right. In that case, we would easily notice the wedding ring is still towards the cardiac protuberance in the mirror image. And I can't imagine whether we would have developed the concept of right and left in the first place, if we lacked bilateral symmetry.
The planet's surface also lacks an evident opposition in the sagital plane -- moreover, there even isn't such a plane, like in the case of the frontal plane. The planet's surface is our best reference while being on the Earth, and that surface consists on a horizontal plane and basically the lack of any other, thinking of it matematically. Therefore, whith no sagital plane dividing the environment, and with no obvious visible references different on each of our body's halves (where we do have such a plane)... and with the mental concept of left and right! Our mind finds it hard to resist the temptation of using that concept.

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Another thing, about why we tend to use the concept or left and right even more.
As it's been already discaussed, it's not the mirror but the observer who reverts the image, in their brain. And they invert the image because they RECOGNIZE holaobserver doesn't recognize as left-right oriented, something that would be interpretated the same way in any left-to-right or right-to-left orientation.
Can you read Russian? I can't. So if I happen to take a text entirely written in Russian, and then invert it horizontally, I wouldn't really notice the change. So, if texts written in Russian were the only thing I had ever seen reflected on a mirror, I wouldn't even understand what paradox people talk about.

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Now, regarding the discussion with Kathy about east and west, there's a point in which I disagree or don't really understand your explanation. I don't see how those directions can change depending on how an observer is positioned. If I travel from Chile to Argentina, I'm moving east from my original position. And a friend of mine living in New Zealand would also understand I'm moving in a west-to-east fashion, as I'd be moving on a line that, prolongued from South America and once having reached Oceania, would first pass through Australia and then through New Zealand. West and East are relative to the Earth's rotation and its relation to the sun, aren't they? But not to the planet's surface nor your location in it.


Once more, great site!

[MikeO]

Hello juan, and WELCOME!

I don't get too many vocal visitors here, so thank you for all your comments.

Because of time constraints I can only answer your last question right now. I'll be reading the others more closely sometime soon also.

When I mentioned the relativity of East/West directions, I was referring to 3-D space. However, WHEN RESTRICTED to the 2-D surface of the earth, they do take on more absolute characters, as you have noted.

But in solid space it's different.

Imagine an arrow mounted on a building in Asia, and facing the well established direction labeled in Asia as "East." You can then ask an astronomer friend to determine exactly which star in the Milky Way that arrow is pointing at at some point in time.

Now imagine an arrow mounted similarly at a spot on the earth exactly 180 degrees opposite that Asian building (somewhere near Kansas?) and facing in that locality's direction labeled "West."

Both arrows, one labeled "East" and the other labeled "West," will be pointing in the same direction in 3-D space, and at the same star.




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