August 5, 2021 • 42 mins
Smoking pools of dark reflection. Propagator of uncanny doubles. Gateway to inverse kingdom. It’s time for Stuff to Blow Your Mind to venture into the world of mirrors, discussing their predecessors, their invention and way humans relate to the world on the other side.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
In those days, the world of mirrors and the world
of men were not as they are now, separate and unconnected.
They were, moreover, quite different from one another. Neither the creatures,
nor the colors, nor the shapes of the two worlds
were the same. The two kingdoms, the specular and the human,
lived in peace, and one could pass back and forth
(00:25):
through mirrors. One night, however, the people of the mirror
world invaded this world. Their strength was great, but after
many bloody battles, the magic of the Yellow Emperor prevailed.
The Emperor pushed back the invaders, imprisoned them within the mirrors,
and punished them by making them repeat, as though in
(00:45):
a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors.
He stripped them of their strength and their own shape,
and reduced them to mere, servile reflections. One day, however,
they will throw off that magical lethargy. The first to
awaken will be the fish. Deep in the mirror. We
will perceive a very faint line, and the color of
(01:08):
this line will be like no other color. Later on,
other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little, they
will differ from us. Little by little. They will not
imitate us. They will break through the barrier of glass
or metal, and this time will not be defeated. Welcome
(01:30):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're kicking off a series of episodes about the
mirror as a human invention. This is actually an idea
(01:50):
that I guess we talked about doing before, but but
it was prompted by a recent listener suggestion from a
listener named Heather. So thanks for the idea, Heather. Yeah,
this is this is gonna be one that will be
at least two episodes, maybe more, because there's so many
different angles you can take once you start gazing into
the mirror. Uh, you have the history of the technology,
various cultural traditions involving mirrors, the psychology of mirrors. So
(02:16):
we'll just see, we'll see how far we get and
if we ever make it back out again. You know,
that opening reading from Borges made me think, how do
you know that you're not the one inside the mirror
and that the the other side of the mirror is
the real world. That's a very bores question. To ask, yes,
um that that that cold opening is from animals that
live in the mirror, Which is a just a couple
(02:38):
of page section in the Book of Imaginary Beings by
jore Luis Borges, which is a fabulous little book. I
recommend anyone interested in creatures and sort of poetic dreamlike
interpretations of creatures to pick that up. It's it's a
lot of fun with Borges writing about established creatures from
different mythologies, but also as in this, seemingly you know,
(03:01):
just dreaming up something of his own, which which I
like quite a bit. Um. He was certainly an author
who was captivated by by mirrors and additions in addition
to things like dreams and mazes, and he has other
works that involved mirrors, such as Covered Mirrors, and also
an excellent poem simply titled Mirrors. Uh. There's one passage
from that that I always come back to. Uh. This
(03:24):
goes as follows. I see them as infinite elemental executors
of an ancient pact to multiply the world, like the
act of begetting sleepless bringing doom. So is the them
there the mirrors or the creatures inside the mirrors? It
is It's just the mirrors here, right, I think so,
I think he's just talking about mirrors in this case
(03:44):
as opposed to beings within the mirror. But I think
one of the great things about both of these were
excited here is that that is that that Borges understood
the weirdness of mirrors in a way that I think
we all connect to it times. But then we're we
live in such a mirrored age that we we often
(04:05):
forget it. We often let the weirdness of mirrors pass
us by, uh. And it's only when we were reminded
of the strangeness of the whole scenario, uh, that that
once again we enter this kind of mindset. Also just
generally like bores to to read motivations into inanimate objects.
But another way I wanted to get us started today
(04:26):
is with a very strange fact that many people may
have considered before, but many may not have. I don't
think I had really thought about this before we started
doing this episode. So I want you to start by
closing your eyes and picturing your own face. You got
it right, You know what you look like. So you
think about the lines, the colors, the proportions, um, maybe
(04:49):
the little asymmetries the way your hair parts, or maybe
you have a mole on one side or one iris
that's a little bit different than the other. Uh. If
you're practiced at getting photo graft, you probably know you
have a good side, right. You know, most people who
get their picture taken a lot, they figure out which
side of their face they like better, and they kind
of orient to position that one for the camera. But
(05:11):
now we want you to consider that it is almost
a guarantee that this face you're imagining right now, your
own face, is not really what you look like to
other people. And this is not just because of the
fuzziness of memory and imagination, but because it's almost certain
that your mental image of your own face is based
(05:33):
mostly on your experience of looking in a mirror, and
a mirror does not show you the version of yourself
that people see when they look at you, because, as
you know, the image in a mirror is reversed. Your
mental image of your own face, unless for some reason
it's based on something other than looking in a mirror,
(05:54):
is inverted from reality. Isn't that bizarre? It is? Yeah, again,
this is something that I think most of us have
encountered since we're very young. You know it's it's it's
one of the first sort of tricks of the mirrors
that you learn, uh, and we grow accustomed to it,
and then we forget that it's strange. Um. Another way
of thinking about this goes as follows. So, if you
(06:16):
hold a dagger in your right hand and you confront
your reflection in a mirror, like hold it out, brandish
the dagger against your reflection. Okay, you're holding it in
your right hand, but your reflection is technically holding the
dagger in its left hand. So this might again smack
a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious.
But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the
(06:38):
idea that that you are using opposite hands to hold it,
and not merely in a reflective sense. But if you
were to like take that individual out of the mirror,
if they could actually climb out of the mirror and
stand next to you, they would be holding their dagger
in the opposite hand. Another way of looking at it
is that the mirror world is a world of reversed chirality.
(07:00):
Chirality is a term that's often used to describe like molecules,
the handedness of molecules, so you can have a molecule
that has the same chemical constituents, but one is the
left handed orientation and the other is the right handed orientation.
The versions of images you see reflected in a mirror
have opposite chirality of the versions that exist in the
(07:21):
real world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now I have to admit
I had never thought about this dagger um explanation until
I was reading about the Great Perspective Glass, which was
in the possession of the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard
Dr John D. And as Benjamin Woolly points out in
(07:42):
his book The Queen's Conjure, Um, this was This is
one of several I think curios that Dr D kept
in his study. And you know, amid his library he
had a famous library of books, um. And there's another
mirror that he had in his possession that we'll get
to in a bit. But as far as the Great
Perspective Glass went, it was said that anyone who lunged
(08:03):
at the mirror with a dagger or sword found their
reflection lunging back at them with lie hand and weapon.
And again, of course this is not the typical way
of mirrors, and the effect was said to be quite unsettling.
You know, if you were visiting Dr D, he would
he would he might show you this mirror, and then
when you were you know, when you realize there was
something strange about this, he would explain the effect to
(08:26):
you via mathematics of perspective. So I found that interesting
as well, especially since Dr D was also very interested
in things like divination and um and uh and and
and you know, alchemical matters. Uh. This seems to be
an artifact that he would use to explain just merely
like the mathematics of perspective and optics. So it sounds
(08:48):
like what's being described here is something that you can
actually find today, known as a non reversing mirror, sometimes
called a true mirror. And this is typically done by
having two mirrors that are at a right angle to
each other, and then having the subject stands so that
they're looking at the at the vertex where these two
mirrors come together. Uh. And so the way that actually
(09:09):
works out is that the reflections of the mirrors are
reflected in the mirrors at the angles. So what you
actually see is your correct handed version of yourself. Yeah. Now, um,
one of these other mirrors survives to this day and
we'll get to it in a bit. But as far
as I know, the Great Perspective Glass either did not
(09:29):
survive or there's no there's no artifact that is now
known as the Great Perspective Glass. So I think it's
just mostly speculation and exactly what this mirror might have
looked like. But but I was looking around and I
found that you had multiple optical devices at the time
were referred to with the term perspective. And we also
(09:50):
see this reflected in the work of William Shakespeare. Uh,
there's a the for instance, the play Richard the Second. Uh,
there's a there's a crucial scene that involves a mirror.
But there's some there's some wonderful lines that refer to it.
Quote for Sorrow's eye glazed with blinding tears, divides one
thing entire to many objects like perspectives, which rightly gazed
(10:14):
upon show us nothing but confusion. I had to ride
distinguished form. Well, I'm still trying to sort that one out.
That that is complex imagery. Yeah, yeah, I don't think
Richard the Second has really been adapted as much, or
perhaps has performed as much as some of the other plays. Um,
but it looks like there was there was a recent
(10:34):
performance of it that was filmed um in Britain that
had what I think Daniel Tennant in it, playing the
title role. But I was looking around online to find
some some footage of that particular scene and I couldn't.
I couldn't find it, So I have to admit it's
not one of the Shakespeare plays that I'm super familiar with.
I know the movie adaptation of Richard the Third with
(10:56):
Ian McKellen as Richard, and and it's got Jim Broadbent
as a particularly bizarre Buckingham. Uh. That's a good one. Yeah,
I fondly remember that one for sure. Now all of
this reminds me of another reality about mirrors that I
think underlines just how strange they are to us, and
that is we tend to not really understand what we're
(11:17):
looking at with a mirror. I know this is one
of your favorite facts. This has come up several times. Yeah,
I have brought this up before. Um, this is really
interesting though. So back in two thousand five, a psychology
study from the University of Liverpool judge that people tend
to not really understand how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they
don't understand that the location of the viewer matters in
(11:40):
determining what is visible. So this study investigated people's perception
and knowledge of of a planner mirror reflections. One researcher
on this study, Dr Marco Bertamini, pointed out that the
Venus effect is a great example of this. So um
the Venus effect. It basically works like this. If you
consider the seventeen century painting UH the the the Rugby
(12:02):
Venus by Diego Velaquez, which you can you can look
up if you look up a picture of if you
just do a search for r O K E b
y Venus, you'll see this. It is uh a nude
woman reclined on uh sort of a bed and a
cupid cherub type being is holding a mirror so that
she can look in it. She's looking away from us
(12:24):
the viewer. She's looking in the mirror, and we the viewer,
see her face in the mirror. And of course this
this raises the question what is she looking at in
the mirror? Well, we, as the viewer of this painting,
we tend to assume she is looking at her own image.
This is some sort of a you know, a contemplation
of vanity or what have you. But if we can
see her face, if you, the viewer, can see her
(12:46):
face in the mirror, that means she's looking at your face.
She's not looking at herself, she's looking at you. That's
a good point. Yeah, I would not have noticed. I
initially saw this and assumes she was looking at herself.
But absolutely we see her face directly in this mirror,
and that means she would see our face directly in
the mirror. Because I think the the optics term for
(13:09):
this is that the on flat reflective surfaces, the angle
of incidence of the light waves bouncing off is reproduced
across what's called the normal. So if you imagine a
line hitting the mirror perpendicular to the mirror surface, the
angle of viewing relative to that perpendicular line is then
reproduced on the other side of it. Yeah. So yeah,
(13:33):
that means if you can see their face, they can
see your face. I want to read a quick quote
from Bertamini here in reference to this paper. He's quoted
as saying, quote, mirrors make us see virtual objects that
exist in a virtual world. They are windows onto this world.
On the one hand, we trust what we see, but
(13:54):
on the other hand, this is a world that we
know has no physical existence. This is one of the
reasons why aroout history, people have been fascinated by mirrors.
I know this is something I've brought up before, but
I think of fact that also helps explain why we
mirrors are weird to us is that if you ever
encounter a mirror in a video game, First of all,
(14:15):
there's a very good chance that the mirror does not work.
You know that it's just kind of a weird flat surface,
and you might just in passing say, huh, I wonder
why none of the mirrors in Silent Hill work. Is
maybe it's just because this is a haunted place and
mirrors don't work here. Um, But of course the reality
and I understand it's quite complicated. This changes with the
(14:35):
evolution of of of video game programming. But uh, it's
my understanding that yet to create a mirror, uh, it
requires a great deal of work, And if you encounter
a working mirror in a video game, it's essentially, um,
the programmer showing off to a certain extent, and that
in some of the older cases, at least, to create
the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video game
(14:57):
where you're you know, creature or being your avatar is reflected,
they would have to actually reproduce that being, So they
would have to do, in the context of the game
what a mirror appears to do in our reality. Right,
So like across from the bathroom, you would have a
a chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same
(15:20):
with like a mirror image of your thing moving around
in there, and you're just seeing it through windows, as
if the Yellow Emperor has punished this other being and
made them stand in that little room and reproduce all
of your movements. That's great, this may have changed. I
don't know a lot about how video games work, but
you hear the phrase when people are bragging about how
cool the new video games and processors are and all
(15:42):
that they talk about ray tracing. I think that actually
does have to do with simulating the pathways of rays
of light. So maybe that would change how mirrors work
in games. I'm not sure. Yeah, it would make it
sounds like like it potentially could. Yeah, because we would
be talking about actually creating a virtual world with working
optics um which which I think is often one of
(16:02):
that Yeah. Well, once you start reading about how optics
have worked, how lighting a room works in a video game.
It gets uh, It's it's rather complicated, but fascinating and
ultimately makes you rethink about how light works in our
reality and how we perceive it to work. Right. Thank. Okay, So,
(16:26):
anytime we talk about an invention, we like to talk
about what came before, what was there before there was
such a thing as an artificial mirror, And in this case,
I think the evidence is pretty clear naturally reflective surfaces.
So I was looking around at some papers about the
prehistory of mirrors, and almost all authorities that I could
(16:46):
find seem to agree that, by far the most common
natural reflective surface for our pre technological ancestors would have
been a very still body of water. Now, of course,
not all all bodies of water are are useful in
this regard. Rushing rivers and ocean waves are not very reflective,
but still bodies of water, quiescent bodies of water under
(17:10):
the right circumstances can form extremely clear reflective surfaces. So
these in the natural world might have been pools or ponds,
or water collected in rock or clay containers. In fact,
I was reading a paper about the the ancient history
of mirrors by a scholar named J. M. Enoch, published
(17:30):
in the journal Optometry and Vision Science in the year
two thousand six. It was called History of Mirrors dating
back eight thousand years and Enoch points out something interesting
that that I didn't find anywhere else. He says that
quote from approximately seven twenty two b c onward, Chinese
characters for mirrors, known as gion and jing were best
(17:50):
translated as a large tub filled with water. Interesting. This
is a great point. Reminds me of a couple of things.
First of all, obviously we have to acknowledge the myth
of Narcissus uh in the Greek tradition, the what the
mighty hunter who becomes captivated by his own reflection falls
in love with his own reflection in the water. Right now,
(18:12):
by the time that myth was flitting around, there were
already artificial mirrors. But just the idea of looking in
a still pond and seeing your reflection, it's clear that
is a phenomenon that goes back, you know, as far
as as the history of the Earth, and so this
would have been something that was there was experienced by
not just our human ancestors, but pre human ancestors. This
(18:33):
also reminds me of the nineteen five Japanese anthology film
that some of you may have seen called Kaiden Um.
It has a several different just very visual, almost psychedelic
um you know, haunted sequences. One of them is in
a cup of tea, and it concerns a ghostly reflection
in a cup of tea, a reflection that doesn't match
(18:56):
up with the real world, and I've always found that
one particularly creepy. Well, think about how common mirrors are
in horror movies. I think this is not a coincidence,
And though this does play into it, I think it's
also not just the fact that you can close a
medicine cabinet door that has a mirror on it and
suddenly reveal something that wasn't there behind you before. Though
(19:16):
that that's a big one. I think there's very clearly
a natural anxiety people have about things they might see
in a mirror that they don't expect to do, you
know what I mean. And like a lot of old
ghost stories concerned this, but but horror movies today are
still reproducing this effect. There's something behind your shoulder that
you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I think
(19:38):
a great short story. Example of this can be found
in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which from
my mind is just one of his absolute best best works. Uh.
It concerns seeing something. It concerns a haunted mirror and
things seen in a haunted mirror, And I have to
admit I'm a sucker for a good haunted mirror movie. Um.
The film Oculus comes to mind, which I think I've
(20:00):
mentioned before, is a bit of a bit of a
gut punch of a film, but but it really does
some some fabulous things. It's been a long time I
remember that one goes a lot more nuts than I
expected it too. Yeah. Yeah, they do some great stuff
with like characters losing track of time and you really,
you really grow to hate that mirror. We we've spoken
about films and what do you do with an inhuman
(20:24):
adversary and how do how do you depict them as
having like a will and uh and actually being an
evil in the in a in a film, And they
were able to pull that off in Oculus, Like you
really you really hate that haunted mirror by the end
of the film. Yeah. Now I wanted to take a
brief moment to uh, to do a digression on something
that I just thought was really interesting, Which are some
(20:45):
of the most amazing natural reflective surfaces on Earth, which
are flooded salt flats. For example, the biggest salt flat
in the world, the Solar de Uni in the southwest
of Bolivia. This is actually it's it's a remarkable landscape.
It's been used as a set for a number of films.
I think there was a battle sequence set here in
(21:07):
the Last Jedi Um. But if you haven't seen pictures
of Solar de Uni, that's s A L A R
space D space U y U n I. It is
absolutely magical looking it and it calls to mind the
you know, the Kenny Rogers song in The Big Lebowski
I tripped on a cloud and fell eight miles high.
(21:27):
There's just photo after photo. This is clearly a heaven
for photographers and especially photographers who want to capture really psychedelic,
unreal looking imagery. And I found a really good one
that was highlighted on NASA's website that was taken by
someone named Jason Huerta or I'm not sure it's pronounced
Jason's j H E I s O N Wuerta, and
(21:49):
so a lot of these images show what looks like
someone just standing in infinity, like someone just standing in
the middle of a mirror that stretches to eternity in
all directions. Yeah, it's like sky below, sky above, and
then a person standing and possibly upon it, or standing
in some cases standing upon the feet of their own reflection.
(22:11):
And it can be difficult to tell which side is
the reflection in which is the reality, right, and a
lot of so the one highlighted by NASA is in
the nighttime, but in the daytime, especially if there's a
lot of cloud cover, you see all the clouds reflected
in the in the surface of the of the Salt Flat,
and it's just unbelievable. But it's so remarkable looking, mainly
(22:32):
because it is so flat and shallow. This the Salt
Flat covers more than ten thousand square kilometers, and yet
its altitude varies by no more than a few feet
across the entire plane. So when nearby lakes overflow during
the rainy season, the salt Flat will fill up with
a very shallow sea of water. I think the depth
(22:53):
is never more than than a few feet. In some
places it appears to be only inches deep, and that
means that it forms this gigantic, incredibly still puddle of
water stretching for miles, and a very still puddle like
that can essentially create a gigantic mirror, reflecting the sky
all the way to the horizon, and in some places
(23:15):
you can just walk on it like it's so shallow
it looks like you are walking out over the mirror
that goes on forever. So one thing I was wondering
about is why exactly does water reflect images like this
while so many other materials don't. In researching this, it
seems like this is one of those questions that has
a simple answer and a very complicated answer, and I
(23:36):
think I'm going to stick with the simple one, at
least for now. So the simple version is basically, all
objects reflect light. That's how we can see them, right.
You know, objects around you don't produce their own light.
They're reflecting light from the environment, from the sunlight, or
from light bulbs. And what makes mirrors or mirror like
pools of water special is the way they reflect the light.
(24:00):
Whereas most objects tend to scatter the light, they reflect
in all different directions at once. Objects that form mirror
like reflections tend to reflect photons back in parallel instead
of scattering them in different directions. Uh. And so you
can explain this basically in terms of things like still
water or mirrors being much smoother and flatter at the
(24:23):
molecular level than other surfaces. And by virtue of being
smoother and flatter than other surfaces, the light that reflects
off of these materials stays organized in its original arrangement
rather than being bounced off in all different directions and
turning the signal into noise, turning the original image into
(24:43):
just a blur. And there's actually a term for this
in physics, in the physics of light. It's specular reflection
versus diffuse reflection. So specular reflection specular means like a mirror.
Mirror like reflection versus diffuse reflection is the way most
things reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over
the place. For a very rough analogy, you can kind
(25:06):
of imagine you you line up a bunch of those
tennis ball shooter guns. I'm not sure what those are called,
but you have played tennis with one of those things. Okay, well,
they they've got them in some tennis clubs, they'll like
shoot tennis balls at you and you can hit them back. Uh.
So you take a bunch of those tennis ball shooter guns,
you line them up in some kind of arrangement, and
then you shoot them all at a wall. You can
(25:27):
imagine how this would go. If the wall is extremely flat,
the balls will probably bounce back in parallel in something
close to their original arrangement as they were shot at
the wall. But if you shoot them at a wall
that is not very flat, that has a bunch of
bumps and contours and different stuff poking out on it,
they will just bounce all over the place. Now, this
(25:48):
might be kind of confusing because you can think of
all kinds of objects that seem perfectly smooth, and yet
you can't see your reflection in them. Like a white
sheet of paper. You know, you're print our paper is
very smooth, and while it reflects a lot of light
that's the you know, the white color coming off of it,
it clearly isn't specular reflection. You can't see images reflected
(26:11):
in it. So the main issue with surfaces like this
is that, well, they might be relatively smooth at the
macroscopic scale, at the microscopic scale. These surfaces are not
actually smooth. Now, remember when you're when you're talking about light,
the tennis balls you're shooting at the surface are photons,
and so it matters is the molecular level, uh robb.
(26:32):
I attached to picture for you to look at what
paper looks like under a scanning electron microscope, and it
is not smooth at all. Now. It looks like some
sort of kind of like crazy fiber art or or
you know, if you'll occasionally find homemade paper that that
looks like it's barely usable because it's so rustic and rough,
and you can see all the different grains and the
(26:54):
you know, the the and the like the remnants of
plants in it. That's kind of what this looks like.
It looks like a tattered portion of I don't know,
some sort of a bog mummy shroud. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's very good. It looks like a million mummies all
unraveled at the same time into a pile. And and
now you're using it to to print out your resume
(27:15):
or even a plate of noodles of some kind. It
has that more of that appearance than anything like a
flash sheet of paper. Yeah, it's made out of fibers.
And and once you zoom into the level that would
be relevant to how photons are reflected off of it,
those fibers are incredibly apparent. But surfaces that produce a
very clear specular reflection tend to be very smooth and flat,
(27:36):
even at the molecular level, so that they can again
reflect those rays of light in parallel formation instead of
scattering them all over the place. And uh, and I
think it's interesting to observe how sometimes even smooth, relatively
non reflective surfaces can start to display some amount of
specular reflection when they become wet. So think about the
(27:58):
way that something that is normally not doesn't have specular
reflection at all, you know, a rough concrete surface or
or black asphalt street, you know. But now imagine it's raining,
and suddenly these surfaces becomes slick with with rain water
they can start to turn into a kind of hazy
mirror in the rain. So what we're left with here
(28:20):
is that there are natural mirrors in the environment, mostly flat, shallow,
stable bodies of water, and then there are also, you know,
somewhat less clear but still at least partially mirror like
phenomena that occur transiently, say, just whenever it rains, and
certain types of surfaces get wet. Even a normally non
(28:41):
reflective rock surface can start to become a little bit
like a mirror once it gets slicked with rain. So
this experience of seeing reflections would go deep, deep, back
into prehistory. But I guess the question we want to
think as well. Okay, so a surface, a very still
surface of a pool can show you reflection. You might
see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock. But
(29:04):
what is the earliest evidence we have of people intentionally
making mirrors as a deliberate piece of technology, Because you
with a still pool of water, you can't take it
with you somewhere or hang it up on your wall.
What are the earliest artifact mirrors in the archaeological record?
And so what I found was that probably the oldest
mirrors made by humans were obsidian mirrors. The the oldest
(29:27):
examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in
modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the
Neolithic settlement of Chattelho Yok, which is an extremely fascinating
archaeological site. I know We've talked about it on the
show a number of times before, a kind of proto city.
Imagine a city without streets, with houses all bunched together
(29:50):
and sharing walls that you would access through openings in
the roofs of the houses and uh and you got
a very very interesting settlement. Lots of cool stuff about
that we can infer about their culture, religious beliefs and
all that, um, but also a very early site for
the discovery of mirrors. So again I want to reference
that paper I mentioned earlier by J. M. Enoch. Enoch
(30:13):
writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region
of Chattahoyak from approximately six thousand BC s that's roughly
eight thousand years ago. Uh. In these graves contained obsidian mirrors.
These mirrors were apparently made by taking a piece of obsidian,
(30:34):
grinding it down to a sort of circular, flat or
more often slightly convex surface, and polishing it until highly
smooth and reflective. And there's a picture that's reproduced in
enoch paper reproducing color I think because it's so striking
showing that in in full sunlight and daylight, this mirror
(30:54):
from the ancient ancient world still produces a pretty clear picture.
I mean, there is a certain darkness to it. It
is quite literally a black mirror, but you see color
in it, You see the you know, the details of
the face. It is an effective mirror. It's uh, you know,
it's if we were forced to use this today, obviously
(31:15):
there are certain places you would be able to use it.
You can't imagine your dentist using an obsidian mirror to uh,
you know, to to to look around in your mouth.
But if you just had to use this in the morning,
I mean, it could work. This kind of reflection seems
like the sort of reflection you could theoretically like shave
by or apply makeup to that sort of thing. Now,
(31:35):
Obsidian to refresh is a glass like volcanic rock formed
by the rapid solidification of lava without crystallization. So it's
found in places that have undergone what's called rhyolitic eruptions,
So you can find these. You can find this occurring
in various places around the world where there's quickly cooling lava.
(31:57):
Humans have been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though
I've aously depending on where those humans are, they're going
to have less or more access to it depending on
you know, what their their local environment is like, and
how far they've they've traveled and how far they're trading.
Now we know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently,
(32:18):
or at least this is what Plenty of the Elder
points out that it was discovered by a Roman explorer
by the name of Obsidious. You know, whilst traveling in Ethiopia.
Obsidia sounds like a pejorative adjective that I would have
to look up, you know, like a like an eighteenth
century document would insult someone by calling them obsidious. Yes,
(32:39):
here's a quote from Plenty in translation obviously quote. Among
the various kinds of glass, we may also reckon obsidian
glass a substance very similar to the stone which Obsidious
discovered in Ethiopia. This stone is of a very dark
color and sometimes transparent, but it is dull to the
site and reflects when attached as a mirror to walls,
(33:02):
the shadow of the object rather than the image. Oh
what does that mean, the shadow rather than the image? Well,
I think this is you know, this is one of
those cases where we we have to re read into
what plenties talking about here and assume that he might
be dealing with secondhand or third hand information about it. Uh,
And I guess it has to do with the sort
(33:23):
of image you see reflected in obsidian that it may
it has a dark appearance to it, So I can
imagine that being described as being oh well, it doesn't
actually reflect the image. It reflects the shadow of the image,
you know, almost like it's this kind of like a
window into a ring raithed world where everything has this
darker semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I
(33:46):
was wondering if it was possible that could be referring
to the idea of the reversed handedness of the image
in the mirror. But but then again, Plenty would have
been familiar with mirrors. I mean, they had mirrors by
the Roman period with with other types of mirror is
made from other types of materials, so he, yeah, he
would have been familiar with how mirrors worked and would
have known that generally they reflect a you know, an
(34:08):
image with reverse handedness. But there are several more things
I wanted to note about the ancient Anatolian obsidian mirrors
that are again brought up in that paper by Enoch.
So one of the things is that he quotes a
(34:28):
a scholar named Dr James Connolly who's done work with
with chattahoyak In in this region. Uh Connolly giving his
opinion that quote their uses mirrors in the sense that
a reflective surface was the functional surface cannot be disputed,
so Connolly saying, there's no confusion about what this artifact
is supposed to be. Clearly, this is a mirror used
(34:48):
for looking in and seeing a reflection. Uh. So descriptions
of some of these artifacts. Enoch writes that one specimen
stands upright on a small flattened base, and the finest
was set into lime plaster. These mirrors were believed to
have originated in the graves of females based upon the
contents of the grave. Okay, so these are typically grave goods,
(35:10):
more often associated with women. They they are sometimes set
into a kind of stand or have some kind of
holder or handle. And then also uh Enoch rights quote.
Obsidian objects were among early exports from Anatolia, and they
were used for spears, arrowheads and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry.
(35:31):
It is reasonable to conjecture that mirrors were also exported
from there. Connolly suggests that the first shaping slash grinding
of an Anatolian mirror surface was quite coarse. The surface
was then polished with a fine grained material such as
silt and buffed with materials such as leather. Uh. And
then I wanted to note another interesting thing I came
(35:52):
across that this was just a note about the production
of these mirrors. I mentioned already that the mirrors from
the ancient world, Uh, sometimes we're slightly convex, So that
would mean they're they're kind of like the mirror that
you would use to see around the corner when you're
making a blind turn on the road. Right, Like, they
bend outwards, So that's there. There are a cone that
(36:13):
points towards you in the middle, as opposed to concave,
which would be more like a bowl bending away from
you from your perspective. Convex is like a bowl upturned
bending towards you. So why would they be a little
bit convex. Well, I was reading an article in Archaeology
Magazine by James F. Vetter called Grinding It Out that
concerns these ancient obsidian mirrors, and it concerns experimental archaeology
(36:38):
attempts to reproduce by hand these types of mirrors, given
the the techniques and materials that would have been available
to the ancient people who made them. And the interesting
thing I wanted to notice in a is in a
paragraph here that I'll just read from Vetter quote. All
of the mirrors produced good images, and all were slightly convex,
as expected from manual grinding, in which linear and rotary
(37:02):
motions result in greater pressure being applied around the perimeter
of the surface. The only technical reference that I've seen
to an obsidian mirror from Chattahoya states that it is
slightly convex. With special preparation of a core and great
care during the grinding process, one could probably make a
nearly flat mirror with no obvious distortions in the image.
(37:25):
So he's saying that if you are grinding and polishing
an obsidian mirror by hand, it is just natural that
the process creates a mirror that is slightly convex because
of the way you're like polishing it with circular motions,
you tend to grind away the outer edge more than
you grind away the middle. But anyway, this started getting
(37:45):
the gears turning in my brain because if you were
living in a culture that did create artificial mirrors, but
just as a sort of byproduct of the of the
technical production process that creates the mirrors, the mirror you
have is likely to be a little bit convex. Does
this change something about people's self image within these cultures?
(38:07):
The same way that our self image is distorted by
the fact that all mirrors at least are basically all mirrors,
reverses your handedness and gives you this inverted picture of
your own face. Would people within say, an ancient Anatolian
civilization that had slightly convex mirrors think of their own
faces as slightly convex compared to what they actually were.
(38:30):
I don't know, just something interesting to think about. And also,
like you probably wouldn't want to overstate this, because again,
these mirrors would not be extremely convex, just slightly convex,
but still might have some kind of effect on on
how people viewed themselves. I mean, if you want to
see what a convex uh, if you don't have a
convex mirror and you want to see what your image
would look like, they're just look at your reflection in
(38:52):
the back of a spoon. All right, it would tend
to kind of like magnify and distort the features in
a in a somewhat strange way. Sometimes it will make
your your nose and middle of your face looked very big,
and the outsides look kind of like they're receding away.
But it can also cause strange effects with say the
perspectives of different objects being reflected at different distances from
(39:14):
a convex mirror. So, for example, I think of you
know you talked about a poem about mirrors at the beginning.
I think of the poem by John Ashbury self Portrait
in the Convex Mirror. Do you know that one? I
don't think I know this one? Now? Well, he's in
this poem. He's talking about a painting by Parmesan Nino
of himself in a convex mirror. And uh and so
(39:35):
Ashbury writes, as Parmesan Nino did it the right hand
bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer and swerving
easily away, as though to protect whatever it advertises. So again,
I imagine the effect would be small here. But but yeah,
I like this idea that the different physical properties of
mirrors could lead to different self image cultures. Yeah, absolutely,
(39:58):
I mean, I guess you would have to factor in
like when mirrors are used and how they're being used.
Are they being used casually by individuals just to see
what they look like, or are they more the domain
of like of priests and uh and religious authorities. Oh yeah,
that's something I guess we haven't even really gotten much
into so far. Is is the religious use of mirrors,
(40:21):
which does seem to be well attested in the ancient world,
mirrors as devices for divination or other forms of religious rituals.
And if you want to know more about that, you're
gonna have to come back for part two because we
will pick up with more discussion of obsidian mirrors and
how they they factored into practices in Mesoamerica and in
(40:42):
the pursuit of divination. So come back for part two
and you'll be under the eye of the God of
smoking mirrors, that's right. And who knows what else we'll
get into, uh, you know, eventually we're definitely going to
get into metal mirrors and the sort of mirrors of
that you know and love from the world around you
or have come to spies and and see as umu
(41:03):
as as perverse objects, so as as bores did in
that one poem. Uh. And then eventually I think we'll
also get into some other examples of mirror psychology, like
what what happens when we are subjected to mirrors? How
does it change the way we think about ourselves or others? Uh?
So there's a lot of stuff to explore. We'll see,
we'll see if we can fit it all into a
(41:24):
into just a second episode, but this might be a
topic that goes for a third episode or maybe even
more who knows, who knows, infinite episodes like and you know,
infinity mirrors. I'm down. Let's just keep buffing it all right.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed
(41:46):
wherever you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on
two season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesdays, Listener Mail on
Monday's Weird House cinemon Fridays. That's the episode where we
just talk about some sort of strange and interesting film.
And then on the weekend we have a rerun Gotta
Catch Ball Huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
(42:08):
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just
to say hello, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
(42:28):
podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.
In those days, the world of mirrors and the world
of men were not as they are now, separate and unconnected.
They were, moreover, quite different from one another. Neither the creatures,
nor the colors, nor the shapes of the two worlds
were the same. The two kingdoms, the specular and the human,
lived in peace, and one could pass back and forth
(00:25):
through mirrors. One night, however, the people of the mirror
world invaded this world. Their strength was great, but after
many bloody battles, the magic of the Yellow Emperor prevailed.
The Emperor pushed back the invaders, imprisoned them within the mirrors,
and punished them by making them repeat, as though in
(00:45):
a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors.
He stripped them of their strength and their own shape,
and reduced them to mere, servile reflections. One day, however,
they will throw off that magical lethargy. The first to
awaken will be the fish. Deep in the mirror. We
will perceive a very faint line, and the color of
(01:08):
this line will be like no other color. Later on,
other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little, they
will differ from us. Little by little. They will not
imitate us. They will break through the barrier of glass
or metal, and this time will not be defeated. Welcome
(01:30):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're kicking off a series of episodes about the
mirror as a human invention. This is actually an idea
(01:50):
that I guess we talked about doing before, but but
it was prompted by a recent listener suggestion from a
listener named Heather. So thanks for the idea, Heather. Yeah,
this is this is gonna be one that will be
at least two episodes, maybe more, because there's so many
different angles you can take once you start gazing into
the mirror. Uh, you have the history of the technology,
various cultural traditions involving mirrors, the psychology of mirrors. So
(02:16):
we'll just see, we'll see how far we get and
if we ever make it back out again. You know,
that opening reading from Borges made me think, how do
you know that you're not the one inside the mirror
and that the the other side of the mirror is
the real world. That's a very bores question. To ask, yes,
um that that that cold opening is from animals that
live in the mirror, Which is a just a couple
(02:38):
of page section in the Book of Imaginary Beings by
jore Luis Borges, which is a fabulous little book. I
recommend anyone interested in creatures and sort of poetic dreamlike
interpretations of creatures to pick that up. It's it's a
lot of fun with Borges writing about established creatures from
different mythologies, but also as in this, seemingly you know,
(03:01):
just dreaming up something of his own, which which I
like quite a bit. Um. He was certainly an author
who was captivated by by mirrors and additions in addition
to things like dreams and mazes, and he has other
works that involved mirrors, such as Covered Mirrors, and also
an excellent poem simply titled Mirrors. Uh. There's one passage
from that that I always come back to. Uh. This
(03:24):
goes as follows. I see them as infinite elemental executors
of an ancient pact to multiply the world, like the
act of begetting sleepless bringing doom. So is the them
there the mirrors or the creatures inside the mirrors? It
is It's just the mirrors here, right, I think so,
I think he's just talking about mirrors in this case
(03:44):
as opposed to beings within the mirror. But I think
one of the great things about both of these were
excited here is that that is that that Borges understood
the weirdness of mirrors in a way that I think
we all connect to it times. But then we're we
live in such a mirrored age that we we often
(04:05):
forget it. We often let the weirdness of mirrors pass
us by, uh. And it's only when we were reminded
of the strangeness of the whole scenario, uh, that that
once again we enter this kind of mindset. Also just
generally like bores to to read motivations into inanimate objects.
But another way I wanted to get us started today
(04:26):
is with a very strange fact that many people may
have considered before, but many may not have. I don't
think I had really thought about this before we started
doing this episode. So I want you to start by
closing your eyes and picturing your own face. You got
it right, You know what you look like. So you
think about the lines, the colors, the proportions, um, maybe
(04:49):
the little asymmetries the way your hair parts, or maybe
you have a mole on one side or one iris
that's a little bit different than the other. Uh. If
you're practiced at getting photo graft, you probably know you
have a good side, right. You know, most people who
get their picture taken a lot, they figure out which
side of their face they like better, and they kind
of orient to position that one for the camera. But
(05:11):
now we want you to consider that it is almost
a guarantee that this face you're imagining right now, your
own face, is not really what you look like to
other people. And this is not just because of the
fuzziness of memory and imagination, but because it's almost certain
that your mental image of your own face is based
(05:33):
mostly on your experience of looking in a mirror, and
a mirror does not show you the version of yourself
that people see when they look at you, because, as
you know, the image in a mirror is reversed. Your
mental image of your own face, unless for some reason
it's based on something other than looking in a mirror,
(05:54):
is inverted from reality. Isn't that bizarre? It is? Yeah, again,
this is something that I think most of us have
encountered since we're very young. You know it's it's it's
one of the first sort of tricks of the mirrors
that you learn, uh, and we grow accustomed to it,
and then we forget that it's strange. Um. Another way
of thinking about this goes as follows. So, if you
(06:16):
hold a dagger in your right hand and you confront
your reflection in a mirror, like hold it out, brandish
the dagger against your reflection. Okay, you're holding it in
your right hand, but your reflection is technically holding the
dagger in its left hand. So this might again smack
a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious.
But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the
(06:38):
idea that that you are using opposite hands to hold it,
and not merely in a reflective sense. But if you
were to like take that individual out of the mirror,
if they could actually climb out of the mirror and
stand next to you, they would be holding their dagger
in the opposite hand. Another way of looking at it
is that the mirror world is a world of reversed chirality.
(07:00):
Chirality is a term that's often used to describe like molecules,
the handedness of molecules, so you can have a molecule
that has the same chemical constituents, but one is the
left handed orientation and the other is the right handed orientation.
The versions of images you see reflected in a mirror
have opposite chirality of the versions that exist in the
(07:21):
real world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now I have to admit
I had never thought about this dagger um explanation until
I was reading about the Great Perspective Glass, which was
in the possession of the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard
Dr John D. And as Benjamin Woolly points out in
(07:42):
his book The Queen's Conjure, Um, this was This is
one of several I think curios that Dr D kept
in his study. And you know, amid his library he
had a famous library of books, um. And there's another
mirror that he had in his possession that we'll get
to in a bit. But as far as the Great
Perspective Glass went, it was said that anyone who lunged
(08:03):
at the mirror with a dagger or sword found their
reflection lunging back at them with lie hand and weapon.
And again, of course this is not the typical way
of mirrors, and the effect was said to be quite unsettling.
You know, if you were visiting Dr D, he would
he would he might show you this mirror, and then
when you were you know, when you realize there was
something strange about this, he would explain the effect to
(08:26):
you via mathematics of perspective. So I found that interesting
as well, especially since Dr D was also very interested
in things like divination and um and uh and and
and you know, alchemical matters. Uh. This seems to be
an artifact that he would use to explain just merely
like the mathematics of perspective and optics. So it sounds
(08:48):
like what's being described here is something that you can
actually find today, known as a non reversing mirror, sometimes
called a true mirror. And this is typically done by
having two mirrors that are at a right angle to
each other, and then having the subject stands so that
they're looking at the at the vertex where these two
mirrors come together. Uh. And so the way that actually
(09:09):
works out is that the reflections of the mirrors are
reflected in the mirrors at the angles. So what you
actually see is your correct handed version of yourself. Yeah. Now, um,
one of these other mirrors survives to this day and
we'll get to it in a bit. But as far
as I know, the Great Perspective Glass either did not
(09:29):
survive or there's no there's no artifact that is now
known as the Great Perspective Glass. So I think it's
just mostly speculation and exactly what this mirror might have
looked like. But but I was looking around and I
found that you had multiple optical devices at the time
were referred to with the term perspective. And we also
(09:50):
see this reflected in the work of William Shakespeare. Uh,
there's a the for instance, the play Richard the Second. Uh,
there's a there's a crucial scene that involves a mirror.
But there's some there's some wonderful lines that refer to it.
Quote for Sorrow's eye glazed with blinding tears, divides one
thing entire to many objects like perspectives, which rightly gazed
(10:14):
upon show us nothing but confusion. I had to ride
distinguished form. Well, I'm still trying to sort that one out.
That that is complex imagery. Yeah, yeah, I don't think
Richard the Second has really been adapted as much, or
perhaps has performed as much as some of the other plays. Um,
but it looks like there was there was a recent
(10:34):
performance of it that was filmed um in Britain that
had what I think Daniel Tennant in it, playing the
title role. But I was looking around online to find
some some footage of that particular scene and I couldn't.
I couldn't find it, So I have to admit it's
not one of the Shakespeare plays that I'm super familiar with.
I know the movie adaptation of Richard the Third with
(10:56):
Ian McKellen as Richard, and and it's got Jim Broadbent
as a particularly bizarre Buckingham. Uh. That's a good one. Yeah,
I fondly remember that one for sure. Now all of
this reminds me of another reality about mirrors that I
think underlines just how strange they are to us, and
that is we tend to not really understand what we're
(11:17):
looking at with a mirror. I know this is one
of your favorite facts. This has come up several times. Yeah,
I have brought this up before. Um, this is really
interesting though. So back in two thousand five, a psychology
study from the University of Liverpool judge that people tend
to not really understand how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they
don't understand that the location of the viewer matters in
(11:40):
determining what is visible. So this study investigated people's perception
and knowledge of of a planner mirror reflections. One researcher
on this study, Dr Marco Bertamini, pointed out that the
Venus effect is a great example of this. So um
the Venus effect. It basically works like this. If you
consider the seventeen century painting UH the the the Rugby
(12:02):
Venus by Diego Velaquez, which you can you can look
up if you look up a picture of if you
just do a search for r O K E b
y Venus, you'll see this. It is uh a nude
woman reclined on uh sort of a bed and a
cupid cherub type being is holding a mirror so that
she can look in it. She's looking away from us
(12:24):
the viewer. She's looking in the mirror, and we the viewer,
see her face in the mirror. And of course this
this raises the question what is she looking at in
the mirror? Well, we, as the viewer of this painting,
we tend to assume she is looking at her own image.
This is some sort of a you know, a contemplation
of vanity or what have you. But if we can
see her face, if you, the viewer, can see her
(12:46):
face in the mirror, that means she's looking at your face.
She's not looking at herself, she's looking at you. That's
a good point. Yeah, I would not have noticed. I
initially saw this and assumes she was looking at herself.
But absolutely we see her face directly in this mirror,
and that means she would see our face directly in
the mirror. Because I think the the optics term for
(13:09):
this is that the on flat reflective surfaces, the angle
of incidence of the light waves bouncing off is reproduced
across what's called the normal. So if you imagine a
line hitting the mirror perpendicular to the mirror surface, the
angle of viewing relative to that perpendicular line is then
reproduced on the other side of it. Yeah. So yeah,
(13:33):
that means if you can see their face, they can
see your face. I want to read a quick quote
from Bertamini here in reference to this paper. He's quoted
as saying, quote, mirrors make us see virtual objects that
exist in a virtual world. They are windows onto this world.
On the one hand, we trust what we see, but
(13:54):
on the other hand, this is a world that we
know has no physical existence. This is one of the
reasons why aroout history, people have been fascinated by mirrors.
I know this is something I've brought up before, but
I think of fact that also helps explain why we
mirrors are weird to us is that if you ever
encounter a mirror in a video game, First of all,
(14:15):
there's a very good chance that the mirror does not work.
You know that it's just kind of a weird flat surface,
and you might just in passing say, huh, I wonder
why none of the mirrors in Silent Hill work. Is
maybe it's just because this is a haunted place and
mirrors don't work here. Um, But of course the reality
and I understand it's quite complicated. This changes with the
(14:35):
evolution of of of video game programming. But uh, it's
my understanding that yet to create a mirror, uh, it
requires a great deal of work, And if you encounter
a working mirror in a video game, it's essentially, um,
the programmer showing off to a certain extent, and that
in some of the older cases, at least, to create
the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video game
(14:57):
where you're you know, creature or being your avatar is reflected,
they would have to actually reproduce that being, So they
would have to do, in the context of the game
what a mirror appears to do in our reality. Right,
So like across from the bathroom, you would have a
a chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same
(15:20):
with like a mirror image of your thing moving around
in there, and you're just seeing it through windows, as
if the Yellow Emperor has punished this other being and
made them stand in that little room and reproduce all
of your movements. That's great, this may have changed. I
don't know a lot about how video games work, but
you hear the phrase when people are bragging about how
cool the new video games and processors are and all
(15:42):
that they talk about ray tracing. I think that actually
does have to do with simulating the pathways of rays
of light. So maybe that would change how mirrors work
in games. I'm not sure. Yeah, it would make it
sounds like like it potentially could. Yeah, because we would
be talking about actually creating a virtual world with working
optics um which which I think is often one of
(16:02):
that Yeah. Well, once you start reading about how optics
have worked, how lighting a room works in a video game.
It gets uh, It's it's rather complicated, but fascinating and
ultimately makes you rethink about how light works in our
reality and how we perceive it to work. Right. Thank. Okay, So,
(16:26):
anytime we talk about an invention, we like to talk
about what came before, what was there before there was
such a thing as an artificial mirror, And in this case,
I think the evidence is pretty clear naturally reflective surfaces.
So I was looking around at some papers about the
prehistory of mirrors, and almost all authorities that I could
(16:46):
find seem to agree that, by far the most common
natural reflective surface for our pre technological ancestors would have
been a very still body of water. Now, of course,
not all all bodies of water are are useful in
this regard. Rushing rivers and ocean waves are not very reflective,
but still bodies of water, quiescent bodies of water under
(17:10):
the right circumstances can form extremely clear reflective surfaces. So
these in the natural world might have been pools or ponds,
or water collected in rock or clay containers. In fact,
I was reading a paper about the the ancient history
of mirrors by a scholar named J. M. Enoch, published
(17:30):
in the journal Optometry and Vision Science in the year
two thousand six. It was called History of Mirrors dating
back eight thousand years and Enoch points out something interesting
that that I didn't find anywhere else. He says that
quote from approximately seven twenty two b c onward, Chinese
characters for mirrors, known as gion and jing were best
(17:50):
translated as a large tub filled with water. Interesting. This
is a great point. Reminds me of a couple of things.
First of all, obviously we have to acknowledge the myth
of Narcissus uh in the Greek tradition, the what the
mighty hunter who becomes captivated by his own reflection falls
in love with his own reflection in the water. Right now,
(18:12):
by the time that myth was flitting around, there were
already artificial mirrors. But just the idea of looking in
a still pond and seeing your reflection, it's clear that
is a phenomenon that goes back, you know, as far
as as the history of the Earth, and so this
would have been something that was there was experienced by
not just our human ancestors, but pre human ancestors. This
(18:33):
also reminds me of the nineteen five Japanese anthology film
that some of you may have seen called Kaiden Um.
It has a several different just very visual, almost psychedelic
um you know, haunted sequences. One of them is in
a cup of tea, and it concerns a ghostly reflection
in a cup of tea, a reflection that doesn't match
(18:56):
up with the real world, and I've always found that
one particularly creepy. Well, think about how common mirrors are
in horror movies. I think this is not a coincidence,
And though this does play into it, I think it's
also not just the fact that you can close a
medicine cabinet door that has a mirror on it and
suddenly reveal something that wasn't there behind you before. Though
(19:16):
that that's a big one. I think there's very clearly
a natural anxiety people have about things they might see
in a mirror that they don't expect to do, you
know what I mean. And like a lot of old
ghost stories concerned this, but but horror movies today are
still reproducing this effect. There's something behind your shoulder that
you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I think
(19:38):
a great short story. Example of this can be found
in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which from
my mind is just one of his absolute best best works. Uh.
It concerns seeing something. It concerns a haunted mirror and
things seen in a haunted mirror, And I have to
admit I'm a sucker for a good haunted mirror movie. Um.
The film Oculus comes to mind, which I think I've
(20:00):
mentioned before, is a bit of a bit of a
gut punch of a film, but but it really does
some some fabulous things. It's been a long time I
remember that one goes a lot more nuts than I
expected it too. Yeah. Yeah, they do some great stuff
with like characters losing track of time and you really,
you really grow to hate that mirror. We we've spoken
about films and what do you do with an inhuman
(20:24):
adversary and how do how do you depict them as
having like a will and uh and actually being an
evil in the in a in a film, And they
were able to pull that off in Oculus, Like you
really you really hate that haunted mirror by the end
of the film. Yeah. Now I wanted to take a
brief moment to uh, to do a digression on something
that I just thought was really interesting, Which are some
(20:45):
of the most amazing natural reflective surfaces on Earth, which
are flooded salt flats. For example, the biggest salt flat
in the world, the Solar de Uni in the southwest
of Bolivia. This is actually it's it's a remarkable landscape.
It's been used as a set for a number of films.
I think there was a battle sequence set here in
(21:07):
the Last Jedi Um. But if you haven't seen pictures
of Solar de Uni, that's s A L A R
space D space U y U n I. It is
absolutely magical looking it and it calls to mind the
you know, the Kenny Rogers song in The Big Lebowski
I tripped on a cloud and fell eight miles high.
(21:27):
There's just photo after photo. This is clearly a heaven
for photographers and especially photographers who want to capture really psychedelic,
unreal looking imagery. And I found a really good one
that was highlighted on NASA's website that was taken by
someone named Jason Huerta or I'm not sure it's pronounced
Jason's j H E I s O N Wuerta, and
(21:49):
so a lot of these images show what looks like
someone just standing in infinity, like someone just standing in
the middle of a mirror that stretches to eternity in
all directions. Yeah, it's like sky below, sky above, and
then a person standing and possibly upon it, or standing
in some cases standing upon the feet of their own reflection.
(22:11):
And it can be difficult to tell which side is
the reflection in which is the reality, right, and a
lot of so the one highlighted by NASA is in
the nighttime, but in the daytime, especially if there's a
lot of cloud cover, you see all the clouds reflected
in the in the surface of the of the Salt Flat,
and it's just unbelievable. But it's so remarkable looking, mainly
(22:32):
because it is so flat and shallow. This the Salt
Flat covers more than ten thousand square kilometers, and yet
its altitude varies by no more than a few feet
across the entire plane. So when nearby lakes overflow during
the rainy season, the salt Flat will fill up with
a very shallow sea of water. I think the depth
(22:53):
is never more than than a few feet. In some
places it appears to be only inches deep, and that
means that it forms this gigantic, incredibly still puddle of
water stretching for miles, and a very still puddle like
that can essentially create a gigantic mirror, reflecting the sky
all the way to the horizon, and in some places
(23:15):
you can just walk on it like it's so shallow
it looks like you are walking out over the mirror
that goes on forever. So one thing I was wondering
about is why exactly does water reflect images like this
while so many other materials don't. In researching this, it
seems like this is one of those questions that has
a simple answer and a very complicated answer, and I
(23:36):
think I'm going to stick with the simple one, at
least for now. So the simple version is basically, all
objects reflect light. That's how we can see them, right.
You know, objects around you don't produce their own light.
They're reflecting light from the environment, from the sunlight, or
from light bulbs. And what makes mirrors or mirror like
pools of water special is the way they reflect the light.
(24:00):
Whereas most objects tend to scatter the light, they reflect
in all different directions at once. Objects that form mirror
like reflections tend to reflect photons back in parallel instead
of scattering them in different directions. Uh. And so you
can explain this basically in terms of things like still
water or mirrors being much smoother and flatter at the
(24:23):
molecular level than other surfaces. And by virtue of being
smoother and flatter than other surfaces, the light that reflects
off of these materials stays organized in its original arrangement
rather than being bounced off in all different directions and
turning the signal into noise, turning the original image into
(24:43):
just a blur. And there's actually a term for this
in physics, in the physics of light. It's specular reflection
versus diffuse reflection. So specular reflection specular means like a mirror.
Mirror like reflection versus diffuse reflection is the way most
things reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over
the place. For a very rough analogy, you can kind
(25:06):
of imagine you you line up a bunch of those
tennis ball shooter guns. I'm not sure what those are called,
but you have played tennis with one of those things. Okay, well,
they they've got them in some tennis clubs, they'll like
shoot tennis balls at you and you can hit them back. Uh.
So you take a bunch of those tennis ball shooter guns,
you line them up in some kind of arrangement, and
then you shoot them all at a wall. You can
(25:27):
imagine how this would go. If the wall is extremely flat,
the balls will probably bounce back in parallel in something
close to their original arrangement as they were shot at
the wall. But if you shoot them at a wall
that is not very flat, that has a bunch of
bumps and contours and different stuff poking out on it,
they will just bounce all over the place. Now, this
(25:48):
might be kind of confusing because you can think of
all kinds of objects that seem perfectly smooth, and yet
you can't see your reflection in them. Like a white
sheet of paper. You know, you're print our paper is
very smooth, and while it reflects a lot of light
that's the you know, the white color coming off of it,
it clearly isn't specular reflection. You can't see images reflected
(26:11):
in it. So the main issue with surfaces like this
is that, well, they might be relatively smooth at the
macroscopic scale, at the microscopic scale. These surfaces are not
actually smooth. Now, remember when you're when you're talking about light,
the tennis balls you're shooting at the surface are photons,
and so it matters is the molecular level, uh robb.
(26:32):
I attached to picture for you to look at what
paper looks like under a scanning electron microscope, and it
is not smooth at all. Now. It looks like some
sort of kind of like crazy fiber art or or
you know, if you'll occasionally find homemade paper that that
looks like it's barely usable because it's so rustic and rough,
and you can see all the different grains and the
(26:54):
you know, the the and the like the remnants of
plants in it. That's kind of what this looks like.
It looks like a tattered portion of I don't know,
some sort of a bog mummy shroud. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's very good. It looks like a million mummies all
unraveled at the same time into a pile. And and
now you're using it to to print out your resume
(27:15):
or even a plate of noodles of some kind. It
has that more of that appearance than anything like a
flash sheet of paper. Yeah, it's made out of fibers.
And and once you zoom into the level that would
be relevant to how photons are reflected off of it,
those fibers are incredibly apparent. But surfaces that produce a
very clear specular reflection tend to be very smooth and flat,
(27:36):
even at the molecular level, so that they can again
reflect those rays of light in parallel formation instead of
scattering them all over the place. And uh, and I
think it's interesting to observe how sometimes even smooth, relatively
non reflective surfaces can start to display some amount of
specular reflection when they become wet. So think about the
(27:58):
way that something that is normally not doesn't have specular
reflection at all, you know, a rough concrete surface or
or black asphalt street, you know. But now imagine it's raining,
and suddenly these surfaces becomes slick with with rain water
they can start to turn into a kind of hazy
mirror in the rain. So what we're left with here
(28:20):
is that there are natural mirrors in the environment, mostly flat, shallow,
stable bodies of water, and then there are also, you know,
somewhat less clear but still at least partially mirror like
phenomena that occur transiently, say, just whenever it rains, and
certain types of surfaces get wet. Even a normally non
(28:41):
reflective rock surface can start to become a little bit
like a mirror once it gets slicked with rain. So
this experience of seeing reflections would go deep, deep, back
into prehistory. But I guess the question we want to
think as well. Okay, so a surface, a very still
surface of a pool can show you reflection. You might
see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock. But
(29:04):
what is the earliest evidence we have of people intentionally
making mirrors as a deliberate piece of technology, Because you
with a still pool of water, you can't take it
with you somewhere or hang it up on your wall.
What are the earliest artifact mirrors in the archaeological record?
And so what I found was that probably the oldest
mirrors made by humans were obsidian mirrors. The the oldest
(29:27):
examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in
modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the
Neolithic settlement of Chattelho Yok, which is an extremely fascinating
archaeological site. I know We've talked about it on the
show a number of times before, a kind of proto city.
Imagine a city without streets, with houses all bunched together
(29:50):
and sharing walls that you would access through openings in
the roofs of the houses and uh and you got
a very very interesting settlement. Lots of cool stuff about
that we can infer about their culture, religious beliefs and
all that, um, but also a very early site for
the discovery of mirrors. So again I want to reference
that paper I mentioned earlier by J. M. Enoch. Enoch
(30:13):
writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region
of Chattahoyak from approximately six thousand BC s that's roughly
eight thousand years ago. Uh. In these graves contained obsidian mirrors.
These mirrors were apparently made by taking a piece of obsidian,
(30:34):
grinding it down to a sort of circular, flat or
more often slightly convex surface, and polishing it until highly
smooth and reflective. And there's a picture that's reproduced in
enoch paper reproducing color I think because it's so striking
showing that in in full sunlight and daylight, this mirror
(30:54):
from the ancient ancient world still produces a pretty clear picture.
I mean, there is a certain darkness to it. It
is quite literally a black mirror, but you see color
in it, You see the you know, the details of
the face. It is an effective mirror. It's uh, you know,
it's if we were forced to use this today, obviously
(31:15):
there are certain places you would be able to use it.
You can't imagine your dentist using an obsidian mirror to uh,
you know, to to to look around in your mouth.
But if you just had to use this in the morning,
I mean, it could work. This kind of reflection seems
like the sort of reflection you could theoretically like shave
by or apply makeup to that sort of thing. Now,
(31:35):
Obsidian to refresh is a glass like volcanic rock formed
by the rapid solidification of lava without crystallization. So it's
found in places that have undergone what's called rhyolitic eruptions,
So you can find these. You can find this occurring
in various places around the world where there's quickly cooling lava.
(31:57):
Humans have been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though
I've aously depending on where those humans are, they're going
to have less or more access to it depending on
you know, what their their local environment is like, and
how far they've they've traveled and how far they're trading.
Now we know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently,
(32:18):
or at least this is what Plenty of the Elder
points out that it was discovered by a Roman explorer
by the name of Obsidious. You know, whilst traveling in Ethiopia.
Obsidia sounds like a pejorative adjective that I would have
to look up, you know, like a like an eighteenth
century document would insult someone by calling them obsidious. Yes,
(32:39):
here's a quote from Plenty in translation obviously quote. Among
the various kinds of glass, we may also reckon obsidian
glass a substance very similar to the stone which Obsidious
discovered in Ethiopia. This stone is of a very dark
color and sometimes transparent, but it is dull to the
site and reflects when attached as a mirror to walls,
(33:02):
the shadow of the object rather than the image. Oh
what does that mean, the shadow rather than the image? Well,
I think this is you know, this is one of
those cases where we we have to re read into
what plenties talking about here and assume that he might
be dealing with secondhand or third hand information about it. Uh,
And I guess it has to do with the sort
(33:23):
of image you see reflected in obsidian that it may
it has a dark appearance to it, So I can
imagine that being described as being oh well, it doesn't
actually reflect the image. It reflects the shadow of the image,
you know, almost like it's this kind of like a
window into a ring raithed world where everything has this
darker semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I
(33:46):
was wondering if it was possible that could be referring
to the idea of the reversed handedness of the image
in the mirror. But but then again, Plenty would have
been familiar with mirrors. I mean, they had mirrors by
the Roman period with with other types of mirror is
made from other types of materials, so he, yeah, he
would have been familiar with how mirrors worked and would
have known that generally they reflect a you know, an
(34:08):
image with reverse handedness. But there are several more things
I wanted to note about the ancient Anatolian obsidian mirrors
that are again brought up in that paper by Enoch.
So one of the things is that he quotes a
(34:28):
a scholar named Dr James Connolly who's done work with
with chattahoyak In in this region. Uh Connolly giving his
opinion that quote their uses mirrors in the sense that
a reflective surface was the functional surface cannot be disputed,
so Connolly saying, there's no confusion about what this artifact
is supposed to be. Clearly, this is a mirror used
(34:48):
for looking in and seeing a reflection. Uh. So descriptions
of some of these artifacts. Enoch writes that one specimen
stands upright on a small flattened base, and the finest
was set into lime plaster. These mirrors were believed to
have originated in the graves of females based upon the
contents of the grave. Okay, so these are typically grave goods,
(35:10):
more often associated with women. They they are sometimes set
into a kind of stand or have some kind of
holder or handle. And then also uh Enoch rights quote.
Obsidian objects were among early exports from Anatolia, and they
were used for spears, arrowheads and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry.
(35:31):
It is reasonable to conjecture that mirrors were also exported
from there. Connolly suggests that the first shaping slash grinding
of an Anatolian mirror surface was quite coarse. The surface
was then polished with a fine grained material such as
silt and buffed with materials such as leather. Uh. And
then I wanted to note another interesting thing I came
(35:52):
across that this was just a note about the production
of these mirrors. I mentioned already that the mirrors from
the ancient world, Uh, sometimes we're slightly convex, So that
would mean they're they're kind of like the mirror that
you would use to see around the corner when you're
making a blind turn on the road. Right, Like, they
bend outwards, So that's there. There are a cone that
(36:13):
points towards you in the middle, as opposed to concave,
which would be more like a bowl bending away from
you from your perspective. Convex is like a bowl upturned
bending towards you. So why would they be a little
bit convex. Well, I was reading an article in Archaeology
Magazine by James F. Vetter called Grinding It Out that
concerns these ancient obsidian mirrors, and it concerns experimental archaeology
(36:38):
attempts to reproduce by hand these types of mirrors, given
the the techniques and materials that would have been available
to the ancient people who made them. And the interesting
thing I wanted to notice in a is in a
paragraph here that I'll just read from Vetter quote. All
of the mirrors produced good images, and all were slightly convex,
as expected from manual grinding, in which linear and rotary
(37:02):
motions result in greater pressure being applied around the perimeter
of the surface. The only technical reference that I've seen
to an obsidian mirror from Chattahoya states that it is
slightly convex. With special preparation of a core and great
care during the grinding process, one could probably make a
nearly flat mirror with no obvious distortions in the image.
(37:25):
So he's saying that if you are grinding and polishing
an obsidian mirror by hand, it is just natural that
the process creates a mirror that is slightly convex because
of the way you're like polishing it with circular motions,
you tend to grind away the outer edge more than
you grind away the middle. But anyway, this started getting
(37:45):
the gears turning in my brain because if you were
living in a culture that did create artificial mirrors, but
just as a sort of byproduct of the of the
technical production process that creates the mirrors, the mirror you
have is likely to be a little bit convex. Does
this change something about people's self image within these cultures?
(38:07):
The same way that our self image is distorted by
the fact that all mirrors at least are basically all mirrors,
reverses your handedness and gives you this inverted picture of
your own face. Would people within say, an ancient Anatolian
civilization that had slightly convex mirrors think of their own
faces as slightly convex compared to what they actually were.
(38:30):
I don't know, just something interesting to think about. And also,
like you probably wouldn't want to overstate this, because again,
these mirrors would not be extremely convex, just slightly convex,
but still might have some kind of effect on on
how people viewed themselves. I mean, if you want to
see what a convex uh, if you don't have a
convex mirror and you want to see what your image
would look like, they're just look at your reflection in
(38:52):
the back of a spoon. All right, it would tend
to kind of like magnify and distort the features in
a in a somewhat strange way. Sometimes it will make
your your nose and middle of your face looked very big,
and the outsides look kind of like they're receding away.
But it can also cause strange effects with say the
perspectives of different objects being reflected at different distances from
(39:14):
a convex mirror. So, for example, I think of you
know you talked about a poem about mirrors at the beginning.
I think of the poem by John Ashbury self Portrait
in the Convex Mirror. Do you know that one? I
don't think I know this one? Now? Well, he's in
this poem. He's talking about a painting by Parmesan Nino
of himself in a convex mirror. And uh and so
(39:35):
Ashbury writes, as Parmesan Nino did it the right hand
bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer and swerving
easily away, as though to protect whatever it advertises. So again,
I imagine the effect would be small here. But but yeah,
I like this idea that the different physical properties of
mirrors could lead to different self image cultures. Yeah, absolutely,
(39:58):
I mean, I guess you would have to factor in
like when mirrors are used and how they're being used.
Are they being used casually by individuals just to see
what they look like, or are they more the domain
of like of priests and uh and religious authorities. Oh yeah,
that's something I guess we haven't even really gotten much
into so far. Is is the religious use of mirrors,
(40:21):
which does seem to be well attested in the ancient world,
mirrors as devices for divination or other forms of religious rituals.
And if you want to know more about that, you're
gonna have to come back for part two because we
will pick up with more discussion of obsidian mirrors and
how they they factored into practices in Mesoamerica and in
(40:42):
the pursuit of divination. So come back for part two
and you'll be under the eye of the God of
smoking mirrors, that's right. And who knows what else we'll
get into, uh, you know, eventually we're definitely going to
get into metal mirrors and the sort of mirrors of
that you know and love from the world around you
or have come to spies and and see as umu
(41:03):
as as perverse objects, so as as bores did in
that one poem. Uh. And then eventually I think we'll
also get into some other examples of mirror psychology, like
what what happens when we are subjected to mirrors? How
does it change the way we think about ourselves or others? Uh?
So there's a lot of stuff to explore. We'll see,
we'll see if we can fit it all into a
(41:24):
into just a second episode, but this might be a
topic that goes for a third episode or maybe even
more who knows, who knows, infinite episodes like and you know,
infinity mirrors. I'm down. Let's just keep buffing it all right.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed
(41:46):
wherever you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on
two season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesdays, Listener Mail on
Monday's Weird House cinemon Fridays. That's the episode where we
just talk about some sort of strange and interesting film.
And then on the weekend we have a rerun Gotta
Catch Ball Huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
(42:08):
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just
to say hello, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
(42:28):
podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.
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