Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going into the Vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally aired on August five, and it's part one of our series about the Mirror Uh. This is going to be a series that I think will span all of the Vault episodes this month, So settle in for part one. 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 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 punish them by making them repeat, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors. He stripped them of their strength and their own shape, and reduce 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 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 to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of by Heart Radio album Hey you, 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 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 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 Bores 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, yeah, that that cold opening is from animals that live in the mirror, Which is a just a couple of page section in the Book of Imaginary Beings by Jore Louis 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 case, seemingly you know, just dreaming up something of his own, uh, 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 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 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 at times. But then we're we live in such a mirrrored age that we we often 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 mind set. Also, just generally, like borrees to to read motivations into inanimate objects. But another way I wanted to get us started today 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 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 photographed, 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 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 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 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 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 night against smack a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious. But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the the 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. 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 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 person Active Glass, which was in the possession of the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard Dr John D. And as Benjamin Woolley points out in 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 at the mirror with a dagger or sword found their reflection lunging back at them with like 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 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 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 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 survive or there's no there's no artifact that is now own 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 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 upon show us nothing but confusion. I 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 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 Ian McKellen as Richard, and and it's got Jim Broadbent is 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 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 will tend to not really understand how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they don't understand that the location of the viewer matters and 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 seventeenth century painting UH the the the Rugby 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 a 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, 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 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 assumed 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 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, that means if you can see their face, they can see your face. I want to read a quick quote from Burdamini here, uh in reference to this paper. Uh. 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 on the other hand, this is a world that we know has no physical existence. This is one of the reasons why throughout history people have been fascinated by mirrors. I know this is something I've brought up before, but I think the 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, 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 stink is quite complicated. This changes with the 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, right, And that in some of the older cases, at least, to create the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video game 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'd have a a chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same with like a mirror image of your thing moving around in there, and you're just seeing it through windows. Yeah, 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 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 the Yeah. 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 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. Okay, So anytime we talk about an invention, we like to talk about what came before, what was there before the 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 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 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 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 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 BC onward, Chinese characters for mirrors, known as Gion and Jing were best translated as a large tub filled with water. M 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, by the time that myth was floating 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 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 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, 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 a fact, there's something behind your shoulder that you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I think A great short story example of this can be found in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which, from my mindy 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 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 adversary and how do how do you depict them as having like a Will and U and actually being an evil enemy in a in a film elm and and they were able to pull that off in Oculus, like you really you really hate that haunted near 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 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 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, you and 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. 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 Wherta or I'm not sure it's pronounced Jason's j h E I s O N where to And 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, which is the way most things reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over the place. For a very rough analogy, you can kind 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 imagine how this would go. If the wall is extremely flat, the balls will probably bounds 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 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, your printer 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 in it. So the main issue with surfaces like this is that while 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 Rabbi 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 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 and now you're using it to to print out your resume, yeah, 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 clear specular reflection tend to be very smooth and flat, 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 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 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 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 your reflection. You might see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock. But 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 examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the Neolithic settlement of Chattelhoyuk, 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 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 with 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 writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region of Chatte Hooyuk 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 takeing a piece of obsidian, 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 nux paper, reproduced in color, I think because it's so striking showing that in in full sunlight and daylight, this mirror from the ancient, ancient world still produces a pretty clear picture. Yeah, 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 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 or apply make up to that sort of thing. Now, 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. Humans have been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though obviously 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 how far they're trading. Now we know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently, 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, 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, the shadow of the object rather than the image. 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 read 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 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 window into a ring raithed world where everything has this darker semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I 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 mirrors 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 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 scholar named Dr James Connolly who's done work with with Chattelhoy 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 for looking in and seeing a reflection. Uh. So descriptions of some of these artifacts, Enoch rights that one specimen stands upright on a small flattened base, and the finest one 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, 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 wrights quote. Obsidian objects were among early exports from Anatolia, and they were used for spears, arrowheads and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry. It is reasonable to conject sure 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 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 there there are a cone that 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 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 better quote. All of the mirrors produced good images, and all were slightly convex, as expected from manual grinding, in which linear and rotary 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 Chattelhoyac 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. 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 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? 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. 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 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 in the middle of your face look 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 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 Parmesanino of himself in a convex mirror, and uh and so 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, 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, 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 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 despise and and see as umu 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 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 wherever you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesday's 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 weekends we have a rerun Gotta Catch the Ball. Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get 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, It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going into the Vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally aired on August five, and it's part one of our series about the Mirror Uh. This is going to be a series that I think will span all of the Vault episodes this month, So settle in for part one. 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 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 punish them by making them repeat, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of their human victors. He stripped them of their strength and their own shape, and reduce 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 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 to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of by Heart Radio album Hey you, 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 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 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 Bores 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, yeah, that that cold opening is from animals that live in the mirror, Which is a just a couple of page section in the Book of Imaginary Beings by Jore Louis 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 case, seemingly you know, just dreaming up something of his own, uh, 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 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 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 at times. But then we're we live in such a mirrrored age that we we often 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 mind set. Also, just generally, like borrees to to read motivations into inanimate objects. But another way I wanted to get us started today 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 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 photographed, 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 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 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 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 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 night against smack a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious. But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the the 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. 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 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 person Active Glass, which was in the possession of the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard Dr John D. And as Benjamin Woolley points out in 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 at the mirror with a dagger or sword found their reflection lunging back at them with like 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 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 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 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 survive or there's no there's no artifact that is now own 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 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 upon show us nothing but confusion. I 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 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 Ian McKellen as Richard, and and it's got Jim Broadbent is 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 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 will tend to not really understand how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they don't understand that the location of the viewer matters and 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 seventeenth century painting UH the the the Rugby 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 a 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, 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 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 assumed 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 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, that means if you can see their face, they can see your face. I want to read a quick quote from Burdamini here, uh in reference to this paper. Uh. 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 on the other hand, this is a world that we know has no physical existence. This is one of the reasons why throughout history people have been fascinated by mirrors. I know this is something I've brought up before, but I think the 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, 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 stink is quite complicated. This changes with the 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, right, And that in some of the older cases, at least, to create the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video game 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'd have a a chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same with like a mirror image of your thing moving around in there, and you're just seeing it through windows. Yeah, 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 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 the Yeah. 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 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. Okay, So anytime we talk about an invention, we like to talk about what came before, what was there before the 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 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 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 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 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 BC onward, Chinese characters for mirrors, known as Gion and Jing were best translated as a large tub filled with water. M 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, by the time that myth was floating 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 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 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, 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 a fact, there's something behind your shoulder that you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I think A great short story example of this can be found in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which, from my mindy 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 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 adversary and how do how do you depict them as having like a Will and U and actually being an evil enemy in a in a film elm and and they were able to pull that off in Oculus, like you really you really hate that haunted near 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 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 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, you and 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. 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 Wherta or I'm not sure it's pronounced Jason's j h E I s O N where to And 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, which is the way most things reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over the place. For a very rough analogy, you can kind 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 imagine how this would go. If the wall is extremely flat, the balls will probably bounds 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 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, your printer 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 in it. So the main issue with surfaces like this is that while 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 Rabbi 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 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 and now you're using it to to print out your resume, yeah, 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 clear specular reflection tend to be very smooth and flat, 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 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 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 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 your reflection. You might see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock. But 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 examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the Neolithic settlement of Chattelhoyuk, 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 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 with 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 writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region of Chatte Hooyuk 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 takeing a piece of obsidian, 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 nux paper, reproduced in color, I think because it's so striking showing that in in full sunlight and daylight, this mirror from the ancient, ancient world still produces a pretty clear picture. Yeah, 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 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 or apply make up to that sort of thing. Now, 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. Humans have been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though obviously 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 how far they're trading. Now we know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently, 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, 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, the shadow of the object rather than the image. 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 read 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 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 window into a ring raithed world where everything has this darker semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I 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 mirrors 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 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 scholar named Dr James Connolly who's done work with with Chattelhoy 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 for looking in and seeing a reflection. Uh. So descriptions of some of these artifacts, Enoch rights that one specimen stands upright on a small flattened base, and the finest one 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, 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 wrights quote. Obsidian objects were among early exports from Anatolia, and they were used for spears, arrowheads and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry. It is reasonable to conject sure 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 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 there there are a cone that 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 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 better quote. All of the mirrors produced good images, and all were slightly convex, as expected from manual grinding, in which linear and rotary 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 Chattelhoyac 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. 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 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? 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. 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 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 in the middle of your face look 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 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 Parmesanino of himself in a convex mirror, and uh and so 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, 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, 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 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 despise and and see as umu 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 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 wherever you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesday's 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 weekends we have a rerun Gotta Catch the Ball. Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get 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, It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.