Standing before a mirror, Sameer raises his right hand and the reflection appears to raise its left
Standing before a mirror, Sameer raises his right hand and the reflection appears to raise its left. He says a mirror swaps left and right. Aarti asks: if that were so, why does it not swap head and feet as well? Is Sameer right?
Who do you think is right? Pick one.
The answer: No, the swap is something else
Why
Sameer is describing exactly what he sees, and Aarti's question is the sharpest one in the whole topic — she has found a hole by testing his rule against a second case. A mirror does not know left from right; it swaps FRONT and BACK. Your reflection's nose points towards you where yours points away, and everything else stays put — head still up, feet still down. It reads as left-right only because you imagine turning yourself around to face the other way, and it is that turn in your head, not the mirror, that trades the hands. Test: hold up a page of writing; it does not read as reversed words but as a page whose ink now faces away from you. Sameer's rule fails Aarti's test: the mirror reverses front and back.
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