When I was little, I had a fascination with mirrors. I guess I liked Physics from a very young age! :-) I had three favorite things when it came to mirrors: two planar mirrors at right angles, two parallel planar mirrors, and three folding planar mirrors of the same size. In my travels through the various malls and dressing rooms of California and Hawaii, I found many instances of all three. But my favorite memory was of a particular dressing room in a department store here (I think it was JCPenny's). I was playing with my three reflections (we were identical quadruplets!) when I discovered that the mirrors, unlike other dressing rooms I had encountered, could move on their hinges and close to form a triangle, just big enough to fit me. :-) When I closed myself in this triangle, I noticed that I increased from quadruplets to quintuplets to sextuplets to septuplets, and so on, until there were infinity me's. However, we were not all in a big circle, there came a point where the number in the circle stopped increasing, and I noticed many other circles around me. It was fascinating. Now that I think back on this experience with some Physics knowledge, I realize what was happening. When I faced a corner, there was an image of me on each of the mirrors, and as I closed them, secondary and tertiary images began to appear as the mirrors reflected each other's light and their images. When the angle was as small as it could get in the triangle, the mirrors stopped reflecting new images. But there were also circles of images coming from the other two corners in the triange, showing me from different sides in the same manner. The mirror opposite each corner would then reflect the image of the circle of me's, then reflect the images of the images from the other mirrors, creating an infinite field consisting of three different orientations of me's. I tried to illustrate my fascinating experience from above(but not with all the reflections, of course!), adding in a pink bow so I could trace light rays. It was very fun. It's funny, I never got into curved mirrors when I was little. Maybe that woudl have been too complicated for me then. Oh well, I still enjoyed mirrors. I wonder where those mirrors are now...
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