JAD ABUMRAD: Chirality, take 30. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH:  I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we are desperately seeking symmetry.

ROBERT: And thus far, we are failing ...

JAD: Desperately.

ROBERT: Because maybe—maybe, you know, if we took—if we rejiggered our whole approach, because symmetry, you know, is really about ...

JAD: Love.

ROBERT: [laughs] No, it's—it's ...

JAD: What?

ROBERT: No, we're changing the subject now. It's about the way things look when they're flipped around or turned or rotated—and this is where it gets really interesting, reflected.

JAD: Reflected.

ROBERT: Yes, reflected. Because there was a ...

JAD: Reflected.

ROBERT: Yes, there was a mathematician at Oxford University named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

JAD: There's a math-y name for you.

ROBERT: Well, he had a different name as it happens.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Lewis Carroll.

JAD: Oh, like the Alice in Wonderland dude.

ROBERT: The Alice in Wonderland dude. Yeah.

JAD: He was a mathematician?

ROBERT: He was.

JAD: I really didn't know that.

ROBERT: Did you know that he wrote another book called Through the Looking Glass?

JAD: Truthfully, I didn't know they were different books.

ROBERT: You know very little in this particular section of our program.

JAD: [laughs] I really don't.

ROBERT: But there's a part of the book where Alice is standing in her room talking to her cat.

NATASHA GOSTWICK: Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all about my ideas about Looking-Glass House.

ROBERT: This is Natasha Gostwick reading. And in this section of the book, Alice is telling her cat, "Let's take a look at the difference between our world and that world right there in the mirror."

NATASHA GOSTWICK: That's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. The books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way. I know that because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. How would you like to live in a looking glass house, kitty? I wonder if they give you milk in there? Perhaps looking glass milk isn't good to drink.

ROBERT: Perhaps mirror milk isn't good to drink, she says.

JAD: Why are you talking like that? What does that even mean?

ROBERT: Well you just stick with me on this, I think I will make it perfectly clear.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: This is a very, as it turns out, difficult scientific question.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, they call it chirality.

JAD: Chai-what?

ROBERT: This is Neil deGrasse Tyson.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Neil, N-E-I-L, deGrasse, small-de, capital G-R-A-S-S-E, Tyson.

ROBERT: He's an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Also the director of the Hayden Planetarium.

JAD: Cool.

ROBERT: And what is—what is chirality?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, it's when you make a molecule, there's no rule or law that says it has to be symmetric.

ROBERT: Neil says if you zoom into that bowl of milk, what you're gonna find is just chains of atoms that are stuck together in a very particular shape.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And that shape, it could curl in a particular way. So for example, if you have a spring, and you turn your finger in the direction of the spring ...

ROBERT: This is a spring like a coil? 

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A coil. Like the spring out of your click pen. Pull out that spring.

JAD: All right, I have a pen right here.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Undo your pen, pull it out.

JAD: I got the spring out. Here we go.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And look at the way the spring turns and move your finger in the direction it turns.

JAD: Moving my finger, it's turning clockwise. All the way up to the top.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, that spring is that way in—in its life.

ROBERT: Whether it's right side up or upside down.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Doesn't matter.

JAD: Always clockwise.

ROBERT: But if you had a mirror, Jad, do you happen to have something?

JAD: Do I have a mirror? No.

ROBERT: Or—or take your phone, which has a reflected shiny thing.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Put your spring in front of the shiny surface of the phone, trace the spring with your finger and tell me which direction is your finger going?

JAD: Clockwise.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: We already did this.

ROBERT: In the reflection.

JAD: Oh, in the phone, it's kind of hard to tell. It's going the opposite way.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Counterclockwise!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Exactly. And so now you have two oppositely-turned springs. You cannot turn one into the other. They're built differently, yet they are curiously identical. So since molecules are just sequences of atoms, imagine a molecule that has that shape.

ROBERT: If you put that molecule in front of a mirror, just the same as the spring, you've got now two molecules built differently but curiously identical. Kind of like your right hand and your left hand.

MARCELO GLEISER: Your left hand and your right hand are related by a mirror image. It's the same thing with these molecules.

ROBERT: This is Marcelo Gleiser, he's a physicist.

MARCELO GLEISER: At Dartmouth College.

ROBERT: And according to Marcelo, this is how scientists talk about molecules. They call them righties, they call them lefties.

MARCELO GLEISER: Sometimes we call it handedness. Sometimes they get a little more fancy, and we call it chirality because chiral "chéri" in Greek means "hand."

ROBERT: And Marcelo says if you look at pebbles or granite or cement, inanimate stuff, when you look at the shape of things inside, it's a mixture of the two.

MARCELO GLEISER: 50 percent left-handed, 50 percent right-handed.

ROBERT: However ...

MARCELO GLEISER: If you look at all the proteins of living things, they're always left-handed and not right-handed at all.

JAD: Really?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Life has chosen one over the other. Life, as we know it, has ...

JAD: You mean when scientists look inside of living things they—they always see the molecules are pointing one way?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah.

MARCELO GLEISER: Right. So somehow—and this is what's really amazing, somehow life is choosing a very specific shape for the molecules to make up stuff.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's correct.

ROBERT: When you say "life has chosen," let's take that sentence apart. Life, meaning everything that is—that we know of on Earth, every living thing.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hence my phrase, "life as we know it."

ROBERT: Everything.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's what that means.

ROBERT: The littlest things to the blue whale.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That would be as we know it.

ROBERT: The littlest, tiniest thing to the tree, the biggest tree, the giant sequoia.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That would be as we know it.

MARCELO GLEISER: Every protein in you, dogs, trees, you name it ...

JAD: Is it filled with left-handed building blocks?

MARCELO GLEISER: Yes, it's called the chirality of life.

ROBERT: The chirality of life. Life, my friend, is left-handed.

JAD: Hmm, that's pretty, that's—well, it feels cool. But let me just—like, so what?

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I mean, I don't want to put it bluntly. But I mean, like ...

ROBERT: Well, other than the sheer surprise of having everything in life being shaped in one direction?

JAD: No, I mean it is surprising, but I mean, what does it have to do with my life, anyone's life, or the mirror thing?

ROBERT: Well, this brings us back—this brings us back to the mirror mystery and Alice and the mirror milk.

JAD: No.

ROBERT: No?

JAD: Because—because you just told me that the milk is left-handed because milk is an organic thing.

ROBERT: From a living cow, yeah.

JAD: Remember you said that? Life is lefty?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So there can't be any right-handed milk. So the mirror milk doesn't exist.

ROBERT: Well, that's because I forgot to tell you that scientists all the time manufacture mirror molecules.

JAD: They do?

ROBERT: Yeah. Yeah, they go into their laboratories and they synthetically make mirror molecules of all kinds of things.

JAD: Can they do milk? Mirror milk?

ROBERT: I don't know about milk in particular, but I do know that when I talked to an Oxford professor, Marcus du Sautoy, he told me ...

MARCUS DU SAUTOY: If you take the atoms which built caraway seeds ...

ROBERT: Which is the spice they use in rye bread.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY: ... take a mirror image of them, suddenly you get something which tastes of spearmint.

JAD: Huh!

MARCUS DU SAUTOY: It's what's put on Wrigley's spearmint gum. And in fact, there are some very dramatic examples of this, not just where the taste changes but listeners might remember a story about the thalidomide drug.

[NEWS CLIP: In 1958, a West German pharmaceutical firm began marketing a new drug.]

ROBERT: This is a news spot from the early 1960s.

[NEWS CLIP: A sedative so effective and apparently harmless, it quickly became one of the most widely used and prescribed drugs in West Europe: thalidomide.]

ROBERT: Before long, pregnant women started taking it as a way to calm morning sickness. And most of us, well, we know what happened next.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: Every woman ...]

ROBERT: President Kennedy in a press conference ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: ... in this country, I think, must be aware that it's most important that they do not take this drug, that they turn it in. Every citizen, of course, should be aware of the hazards.]

ROBERT: All in all, more than 12,000 children were born with arms and legs that were shortened or deformed or completely missing. The strange thing, according to Marcus, is that we now know that when they first made thalidomide, it was all one-handed. Let's say it was left-handed ...

MARCUS DU SAUTOY: Yeah, and it did actually cure morning sickness.

ROBERT: And was completely harmless. But somewhere along the way, thalidomide flipped. We don't know whether this was in the drug-making process or after, but we do know ...

MARCUS DU SAUTOY: Its mirror image was incredibly poisonous.

ROBERT: So you know what this means, Jad?

JAD: What?

ROBERT: That in a show about symmetry, what we've just discovered is that life itself is actually deeply asymmetric.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Unlike love, where we started the program back with Aristophanes, when it comes to life you don't want to meet the other half.

JAD: Stay away, mirror milk! Stay away!

ROBERT: That's—well, enough about mirrors.

JAD: No, no, no. No, no. I think we can take this another step further.

ROBERT: There is no further step to take.

JAD: No, there is. Because I mean, because something about this chemistry reflections thing resonates for me with the actual experience of standing in front of a mirror.

ROBERT: How?

JAD: Well, you know, when you look at that guy, and you're like, "Yeah, ooh." I mean, we talked about this on stage, actually, in DC at the Shakespeare Theatre. Remember when I asked you that personal question?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. Do you want to do that?

JAD: Oh, yes we do.

JAD: Psychologically, let me ask: psychologically, do you—do you enjoy looking in the mirror?

ROBERT: Is that a question you want to ask me in front of—that's a private question, I feel.

JAD: Surely you know though, that you're—the difference between your true self and your mirror self is not trivial.

ROBERT: My true—what do you mean by my true self? I don't under ...

JAD: Well, I'm gonna tell you a story now about a guy named John Walter.

ROBERT: Oh, the—with the little mustache from Baltimore, from the movies?

JAD: No, that's John Waters. Walter. He's a computer programmer in New Rochelle. Paid him a visit recently because, back when he was in college, he sort of kind of switched places with the guy in the mirror.

JOHN WALTER: It—it was many years ago.

JAD: How old were you?

JOHN WALTER: I was 19.

JAD: 19.

JOHN WALTER: So it was a long time ago.

JAD: We're talking late '70s here. 

JOHN WALTER: But I was—I had already had some issues with the mirror.

JAD: So let me set this up for you. The thing to know about John is that as a kid he had a tough time. Like so many of us, he would get bullied, beaten up on the playground. It was no better when he got into his teens, and as a 19-year-old, his social life consisted of a series of stinging humiliations, like the following.

JOHN WALTER: I remember at the time there was a lot of kids hanging out. You know, there was a crew of people, like, you know, 20, 30, 40 kids would gather together at the aqueduct, beautiful woods of the aqueduct, and go drink beers and smoke cigarettes, you know? I walked into the group, like, "Hey, what's up?" And it's like, "Yeah, whatever." Roundly rejected.

JAD: And that, according to John, was ...

JOHN WALTER: Normal.

JAD: That—that was normal for you. Normal.

JOHN WALTER: Very normal. Like, people would say, "What's that guy doing here? Eww!"

ROBERT: Maybe he was, like, wearing the wrong the plaid pants or had, like, you know, mismatched socks. There might be some ...

JAD: Whatever. Don't you empathize ...

ROBERT: Of course.

JAD: ... empathize with this guy?

ROBERT: Nobody wants to be 19 and be the yucky person. Of course I would empathize.

JAD: …however, the story that will follow centers on a revelation that John had that began just as he was about to start his summer job.

JOHN WALTER: For Con Ed. I was working for them.

JAD: As a painter.

JOHN WALTER: And I had some pictures taken for Con Ed.

JAD: These were ID photos that you had?

JOHN WALTER: Yeah, it was an ID camera that had four lenses, so when they took the negative, there was four of me: boom, boom, boom, boom.

JAD: Like little squares?

JOHN WALTER: Little squares. And I remember looking over and—and going, "Why do I look so weird? Why do I look so weird?"

JAD: “Why do I look so weird?” Because here's the thing: I mean, the John in the pictures was not the John that he knew himself to be. That John was kinda timid.

JOHN WALTER: Nerdy.

JAD: Not cool.

JOHN WALTER: Why do I look so weird in pictures? I look fine.

JAD: What do you mean you look fine? How do you know you look fine?

JOHN WALTER: Well, I thought I looked fine in the mirror, you know, when I looked at myself.

JAD: Of course in the mirror, things on the left go to the right, things on the right go to the left.

Wait a second. That's when it hit him.

ROBERT: What—what hit him?

JAD: It's the hair part.

ROBERT: It's the what?

JAD: It's the hair part.

ROBERT: It's the what?

JAD: It's the hair part. I could do this all night! It's the hair part.

ROBERT: What does that mean? It's the—I hear you, I hear you. What does that mean, it's the hair part?

JOHN WALTER: Well, in the picture, I saw a guy with a right hair part, and in the mirror I was seeing a guy with a left hair part.

JAD: Essentially, John ...

ROBERT: Wait, which part—which side of my hair parted on is this?

JAD: Your left, your left.

ROBERT: My left, okay.

JAD: Now John thought he was a lefty too. He would stand in front of the mirror, and the mirror would tell him he was parting it to the left, but in fact he was parting it to the right in real life. Now the lefty guy in the mirror, he liked that guy.

JOHN WALTER: I was fine with that guy. He was cool. He was—there was nothing wrong with him.

JAD: But he realized he was the only person seeing that guy, so he thought ...

JOHN WALTER: Oh, let me put my hair on the other side.

JAD: "Let me essentially swap real me for mirror me."

JOHN WALTER: It was one of these things where, "Yeah, that looks really weird in the mirror, but I bet you it looks good in real life. Let me go find out."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So what did you do?

JOHN WALTER: Well, that night ...

JAD: He goes back to the aqueduct, the same posse is there as before.

JOHN WALTER: I mean, that same group interestingly enough, they had beat the crap out of me like three years earlier when I was in, like, ninth grade.

JAD: But there he was, now with his hair parted on the left. He says this time ...

JOHN WALTER: Things were different.

JAD: Somebody offered him a beer.

JOHN WALTER: I was like, wow! But the thing that I knew made it better was when I left, I got goodbyes.

ROBERT: This is ridiculous that you would tell me a story about a man who is having social failures universally, shifts his hair over, and is remade. This is like ...

JAD: Look, it's his experience. It's very—this is very easy to dismiss. But I'm gonna win you over.

ROBERT: Yes, very easy.

JAD: Are you ready? I'm gonna win you over! Are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready. Are you ready?

ROBERT: Are you asking me to be broad minded?

JAD: I'm gonna—I'm gonna show you a picture right now.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Okay, have a look at ...

ROBERT: Okay. At?

JAD: Who is that?

ROBERT: It's Abraham Lincoln.

JAD: Our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. Now just stare at him, Robert. Take him in, take him deep into your consciousness.

JAD: By the way, this next part, you can see this picture at Radiolab.org. It's worth checking out.

JAD: His eyes, his nose, his mouth. Pay attention particularly to the hair part, okay? Now look what happens when you flip Abraham.

ROBERT: [gasps] Oh that—wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no. Is this the same picture?

JAD: It's the same picture.

ROBERT: Go back to the other picture. Go.

JAD: All right. There's Abe.

ROBERT: Now do the other one. [gasps] Whoa!

JAD: You see?

ROBERT: That's so weird!

JAD: Now here's the thing: this is what Abraham Lincoln would have seen when he looked in the mirror. He would have seen this guy, not the other guy, the one we all see.

ROBERT: Huh!

JAD: So there's something going on here. Would you not at least acknowledge me that ...

ROBERT: I find this vaguely plausible, yes.

JAD: ... something's going on here. Okay, with your permission, Mr. Cynic, I will now rejoin John.

ROBERT: Who's about to, what, get married and have three babies because his hair ...

JAD: He says after—after he switched his part ...

JOHN WALTER: It just kept getting better and better and better all summer long.

JAD: He was suddenly invited to all of these parties by the very same people who used to beat him up. And for the first time, he says ...

JOHN WALTER: I was clearly one of them.

JAD: Now whether or not you buy that this is in fact because of his hair, that's on you, okay? But let's fast forward just a little bit ...

JOHN WALTER: The next summer ...

JAD: This would have been 1979?

JOHN WALTER: Yeah, 1979.

JAD: John's sitting in front of the TV, and on comes ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jimmy Carter: Good evening, this is a special night for me.]

JAD: ... the President ...

JOHN WALTER: Jimmy Carter.

JAD: ... making a speech about how our nation is in a deep funk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jimmy Carter: Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to solve our serious energy problem?]

JOHN WALTER: The Malaise Speech, you know, that—that infamous "Country is in malaise."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jimmy Carter: It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation, or recession.]

JAD: Now as you know, I'm sure you remember, a lot of people would criticize Jimmy Carter for making this speech because he's up there admitting flaws, and they were like, "C'mon, Mr. President, don't be weak. Man up!" John, meanwhile, is sitting in front of the TV and he's thinking ...

JOHN WALTER: Dude, you gotta change your hair part.

[audience laughs]

JOHN WALTER: And so I wrote him.

JAD: You wrote to him?

JOHN WALTER: I wrote to him.

JAD: Wait, wait. So you said ...

JOHN WALTER: I—I think I just said, "I think you should change your hair and part it on the left. I did myself, and found it to be much more powerful, much more successful." And then about six ...

JAD: Do you have that letter?

JOHN WALTER: I so wish I did. I don't have it. And then about six weeks later, boom, he switched.

JAD: He switched!

ROBERT: No, he didn't!

JAD: John wrote him a letter, and President Carter switched.

ROBERT: No!

JAD: It might not have been John's letter that did it.

ROBERT: No, no. You have no evidence.

JAD: Think about how much—what's involved in a president switching his hair. There are focus groups, there are prayer meetings, there is so much thought that goes into it.

ROBERT: Did anyone actually record this?

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: They did?

JAD: I will—I will now read you a journalistic account from no—a periodical—Washington, you see it right there? You see? Bam, right there.

ROBERT: Oh, man!

JAD: Newsweek, May 7, 1979: "At first, photographers thought they had their negatives reversed, but no, Jimmy Carter has changed the part in his hair from the right side to the left. The Washington press corps demanded an explanation."

ROBERT: But remember that, you know, as opposed to John, who changes his hair and then all the girls give him beers, this guy, he was running against a luxuriantly-haired man, Ronald Reagan, and it didn't matter. He just you know, he got crushed.

JAD: You know what? Forget—forget the Executive Branch. Stay with me now.

ROBERT: Yes. Yes.

JAD: I was with John, and he was showing me pictures of congressmen and of celebrities and I noticed something peeking out at the bottom of the pile.

JAD: I see peeking out underneath the stack of photos is a Superman.

JOHN WALTER: Yeah.

JAD: He showed me a picture of Superman looking mighty in his suit. Notice how he parts his hair?

ROBERT: Yeah, it's a little bit on there, on that side. Yeah.

JAD: Now ...

JOHN WALTER: This is Clark Kent, with him on the right.

ROBERT: Ah!

JAD: And as we know from the movies, Clark Kent is bumbling, sort of dork.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Superman: I mean—I was at first really nervous about tonight.]

JAD: So somebody who made that movie, maybe explicitly, intuitively understood something about the difference. That, you know, the right part said one thing about Clark Kent, the left part said something about Superman. In fact, there is a scene in the movie where Clark Kent's running down an alley, he's about to turn into Superman, he pulls his shirt open to reveal the "S," and literally mid-stride, his hair goes—fwip!—and turns from the right to the left. So ...

ROBERT: You're saying that sophisticated popular cultural motion picture manufacturers and at least two presidents have been persuaded to this position?

JAD: At this very moment on a Saturday night that is what I am saying.

ROBERT: Oh, all right. Well, for argument's sake then, what would you say—I hate to get into this any deeper—explains the difference between putting the part of your hair on the left hand or the right hand?

JAD: Well, if you ask John what he'll say that the left hair part emphasizes strength and logic because it draws your attention to the logical, more masculine side of your face, your brain, 'cause it's a left-brain kind of thing. But I—I don't really know.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So I decided I would actually take this seriously and figure out how to feel about it. So I called up this guy.

MIKE NICHOLLS: G'day, Jad. It's Mike.

JAD: His name is Mike Nicholls.

ROBERT: Oh, from The Graduate. There's a Mike Nicholls.  Very good.

JAD: No, a psychology professor in Australia. An expert in symmetry.

ROBERT: That Mike Nicholls. Okay.

JAD: I ran him through John's theory.

JAD: Have you ever seen the Superman movies?

MIKE NICHOLLS: Some of the earlier ones, I think.

JAD: You know how Clark Kent's hair is parted to the right?

JAD: So I ran through the whole thing, you know Clark's on the right, maybe he's weak, Superman's left, means he's stronger, more assertive.

MIKE NICHOLLS: Right.

JAD: Is there anything to that, anything at all?

MIKE NICHOLLS: Um, yeah. I mean possibly, you know? Now that's—I—I'll have to ...

[audience laughs]

JAD: But—but he did say this, which is interesting, in focusing on the left, John may be picking up on a particular bias that we human beings have to our left side. For instance, here's an experiment that he and his colleagues did.

MIKE NICHOLLS: Take a snapshot of a person's face at baseline when they're showing no emotion.

JAD: Blank face.

MIKE NICHOLLS: And then get them to try to look as happy or sad as they could.

JAD: Take happy guy and overlay him onto no expression guy.

MIKE NICHOLLS: And almost like a contour map, you could actually look at the amount of change, the amount of muscle movement that had occurred.

JAD: What you will see if you measure the muscle movement in millimeters, on each side of the face you'll see that the smile curves a few extra millimeters on the left side of the face. He says this is nearly always the case, always on the left side.

MIKE NICHOLLS: What it's really telling you is that when somebody smiles or they frown or whatever, they're doing it slightly more strongly on the left side of their face.

JAD: Now if this is the case that our left side is sort of saying more emotionally than our right side, then if you think about the mirror, it's kind of a discombobulating thing, you know, because it's taking your left, which is sort of broadcasting emotion, flipping it to your right, you're seeing yourself, you're all mixed up. You don't know which part of you is where.

ROBERT: You—so you're saying, like, because I tend to address you as my attention on your left side, unbeknownst to me, and your left side is actually flipped over to your right side, I don't—it's a "Where are we" sort of question.

JAD: It's—exactly. But John has developed a solution to this problem.

JOHN WALTER: Let me take this one apart.

JAD: He now makes and sells his very own special mirrors right out of his home.

JAD: And is this where you make the mirrors?

JOHN WALTER: Yeah. Everything that goes into the mirrors is made here. You see here, this is the machine that cuts the mirror.

JAD: He buys these giant sheets of reflective glass ...

JOHN WALTER: And ...

JAD: ... and he slices them into little pieces.

JOHN WALTER: Clunk. And then I snap it.

JAD: Now for each mirror, this is the key: he uses two pieces of mirror glass instead of one? What he'll do is he'll take these two pieces and he'll place them together at—at right angles.

JOHN WALTER: Two mirrors at right angles.

JAD: Like, exactly at right angles.

JOHN WALTER: It has to be 90.00 degrees. And let's just push this up a little bit. That's still not enough.

JAD: In any case, when he finally gets it right—which can take hours—what he'll have is this V-shaped mirror. He'll stand it up, put it in a box, and then voila! What you have is a mirror that shows you a mirror image of a mirror image of you. Takes the normally-flipped guy that you'd see in a mirror, re-flips him so that what you are seeing is essentially, well, for the first time in a mirror, you see yourself as other people see you.

JOHN WALTER: Okay, so there you go.

JAD: So what is this that you have in your hand here?

JOHN WALTER: This is—this is a true mirror. This is a—the 12-inch model. And so when you, like ...

JAD: So this is actually what I look like?

JOHN WALTER: Yeah, touch your right eye. See? It's actually on the right side.

JAD: Oh my God!

JOHN WALTER: Isn't that crazy?

JAD: That's crazy!

JAD: It is surprisingly weird to see yourself this way.

JAD: I feel like my nose is going the wrong way.

JOHN WALTER: Yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I never knew my nose went that way. And this little flare in my eyebrows is on the wrong side—or the right side, as it were.

JAD: John claims that many a fair number—and I probably would put you in this bunch, my co-host—when they stand in front of this mirror, they ...

JOHN WALTER: Freak out, many of them, because they—it's just their perception is shaken up a little bit.

JAD: In fact, he sometimes takes his mirrors to these festivals, and he'll sort of set them up and have people look at themselves and then fill out comment cards afterwards.

JOHN WALTER: You know, I mean, if you look at some of the comments, you know, it's like ...

JAD: I am a [bleep] monster in your mirror.

ROBERT: [laughs] What did he say?

JAD: I am a [bleep] monster in your mirror. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: To break we go. If you want any more information on anything you heard, go on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Or if you want to see those incredible pictures of Abe Lincoln, that's where they are.

JAD: That's right. And subscribe to our podcast there as well.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Eleanor Womack from Brooklyn, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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