In the last post I explained that mirrors do not flip left and right, and the example (also used in the Feynman video) was seeing an image of yourself.
I thought of another example — written words. They look backwards in a mirror as well, but if a mirror doesn’t flip left and right, how can that be? As I demonstrate, it’s because we always rotate whatever the words are written on. If we don’t do the rotation, the words are unchanged.
(I apparently started talking a second or two before the recording actually began, but this isn’t Hollywood, so I only did one take)
It may be a little tough to see the uninverted image in the mirror in the tiny youtube video, so here’s a still
A mirror flips in and out, z-axis, reversing image chirality. Touching right-angled mirrors double-bounce unchanged reflect. Don a pair of movie 3-D glasses, close one eye, look in a mirror. Which eye is open?
Reality is not mirror-symmetric toward fermionic matter: particle theory parity violations, chiral anomalies, and symmetry breakings; Chern-Simons corrections to Einstein-Hilbert action. GR is a racemic subset of ECKS gravitation re Ashtekar variables’ chiral decomposition of local Lorentz group connection one-forms (arxiv:1104.1800, 1108.0816). Opposite shoes vacuum free fall non-identically.
Opposite shoes are chemically and visibly identical, single crystal test masses in enantiomorphic crystallographic space groups, e.g., P3(1)21 vs. P3(2)21 alpha-quartz or P3(1) vs. P3(2) gamma-glycine. Examine (jpeg) spacetime geometry with test mass geometry.