Mirrors and Reflections
A mirror reflects light to produce an image. It can show a person parts of their own appearance that would otherwise be difficult to see directly, or reveal a scene outside their immediate line of sight. What appears in the mirror depends on the surface, the object and the observer's position.
The word reflection also describes the act of considering an experience or idea. Everyday language therefore links looking at an image with looking again at something in thought.
Types and Characteristics
- Plane mirrors: Flat reflecting surfaces that produce upright images of the same size as the objects reflected.
- Concave mirrors: Inward-curving surfaces whose images vary with the object's distance from the mirror.
- Convex mirrors: Outward-curving surfaces that show a wider field of view with smaller images.
- Distorting mirrors: Surfaces shaped to stretch, compress or otherwise alter an image.
- Mirrored arrangements: Multiple surfaces that can produce reflections of reflections.
- Water reflections: Images formed at a water surface, with their clarity affected by disturbance of that surface.
In a plane mirror, the image appears as far behind the reflecting surface as the object is in front. This is a virtual image: reflected light reaches the observer as though it had come from a position beyond the mirror. OpenStax: Images Formed by Plane Mirrors
The apparent space within a mirror can therefore be visible without being a space into which the observer can walk.
Historical Background
Mirrors have been made from polished metal as well as glass. The British Museum's record for a bronze mirror describes a plate polished on one side to make a reflective surface. The reflecting face and the material supporting it belong to the same object. British Museum: Bronze Mirror
Polishing, tarnishing, cracking and covering a mirror can each change what can be seen without changing the object standing before it.
Literary Examples
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice considers the room apparently visible beyond the mirror and imagines what its unseen parts might contain. She then passes through the glass into the world on the other side. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter I
Carroll turns a visible image into an accessible setting. The story develops the difference between observing what appears beyond a surface and entering it, while also playing with reversal, familiarity and altered rules.
In Religion
James 1:23-25 compares someone who hears teaching without acting on it to a person who looks in a mirror and then forgets what they have seen. The comparison concerns the relationship between attention, memory and subsequent action. James 1:23-25
Idioms and Figurative Expressions
- A mirror image: A reflected counterpart, or figuratively something very closely corresponding to another thing.
- Hold up a mirror to something: Present an account that enables people to recognise features of themselves or their society.
- Smoke and mirrors: Methods that distract, mislead or create a false impression.
- Reflect on something: Give it considered attention.
- A reflection of something: An indication or expression of another condition or influence.
- A distorted reflection: A representation that alters the proportions or character of what it portrays.
- See yourself in someone: Recognise aspects of your own experience or character in another person.
- Through the looking glass: Into a setting experienced as strange, reversed or governed by unfamiliar rules.
Wordplay
Reflect can describe light returning from a surface, a person's expression showing an emotion, or thought directed towards an experience. Glass can name a material, a drinking vessel or, in older usage, a mirror.