Mirrors Are Special

Most of us clearly take mirrors for granted and simply trust that when we look in a mirror, we will see yourselves as we actually exist. But what is actually happening to cause a reflection of something in a mirror? The stimulus for beginning to research mirrors closer came from watching a short video clip, so I thought I would try the experiment myself to see if it worked for me. The picture at the top of this article is of me holding a bottle of hand soap, pressed against a mirror, with a solid purple folder in between the bottle and the mirror. One might believe that if you put something solid between the bottle and the mirror as I did, you would not experience a reflection of the bottle in the mirror. But the reflection is there on the “other side” of the mirror, so to speak; as I moved around to the side to take a picture, there it was in the back of the mirror, as the only way I can describe it. I will circle back to my thoughts on this ghost image that doesn’t seem like it should be there.

I have been trying to wrap my head around how something could be seen in the mirror that is behind a solid object, so I decided to do some research on mirrors. The best and easiest definition of a mirror is the following, which I credit to a website: https://www.livescience.com/48110-reflection-refraction.html.

“When people look into a mirror, they see an image of themselves behind the…