No the question is "What keeps a train on its tracks (during a turn)?" The answer is the wheels are conical, and slide outwards during a turn, giving the inner wheel a smaller circumference to travel less distance in the same time. The differential is taken care of geometrically.
What keeps a train on the track was easier for me to figure out than the mirror one. And he said this is the easier one. So interesting how different people are
I guess they both had pointy facial features and of course, big imaginations, though they were in different fields, of course. If you're familiar with MBTI, this similarity also makes sense, as Feynman is an ENTP and Robin Williams an ENFP, so their main cognitive function, extroverted intuition, is quite apparent when they are speaking and probably plays a part in you being reminded of the other. Disclaimer: I've heard this through other sources, but it seems plausible to me.
@designflaw01 you obviously did not finish the video... It is obvious that the mirror inverts left and right, however what feynman was trying to explain that even though we perceive the left/ right axis to flip it is the one that is pointing into the mirror that actually gets inverted.
This is a misleading response for anyone that ends up here now. the left and right only flip because they're relative measurements and we measure them as if the reflected image was behind the mirror. Since the image behind the mirror is just your image before the mirror reflected back at you left and right doesn't really make any sense, but your brain decides it's needed and makes it up anyways. There's no object behind the mirror that exists in the way it would need to in order for left and right to be meaningful for that object. You're just seeing your left and right reflected back at you, but because of how the positions relative to the reflection change your brain assigns a meaningless left and right to them that is reverse what it would be in real life.
If you listened, it was a typical problem used in MIT fraternities. And most folks, the answer is only obvious once it is explained. And the part of genius is to boil a complex problem down to its essentials so that the answer seem easy.
Except he didn't .. he made it about 10x more obscure than it actually is. It's not that it isn't more nuanced - its because it can be explained easily. It's when people intentionally complicate people's innate understanding of the world that I get worried. And I know this is a common question... but it has a simple answer... mirrors reflect your reality, not what your mirror image would see. You raise your left hand, the left-hand side image raises it's hand. Because we're used to people being mostly symmetrical, we don't get it, but are constantly confused by it (because we're used to seeing just 'normal' un-reflected people.... and we just assume a left hand will appear on the right side of a person's image in our eyes). The confusion is biology/evolution... not physics. Coz mirrors aren't something we've evolved around.
An easy comparison would be to ask a person in front of you to show you the palm of his left hand, and tell him it’s his right hand from your perspective.
@NightshadeMortis 'The mirror allows you to see your self from the front as others see you.' When others look at me from the front my heart is not on the right.
"We don't think of the idea that the person has been pushed and squashed backwards-forwards, because that's not what ordinarily happens to people." Pfft, this guy's never been to Detroit, obviously.
here is the answer you were looking for 2 years ago. i've been thinking about this off and on over the years after reading your comment. check it out --- [ howamirrorworks / tumblr ]
everyone is mirroring me but you know everything about me.....i think..?........im mirroring YU, but by myself. but solo mode, no more games, its hard for me to mirror in groups. 1v1 is better. meet boodah.
WTF is he talking about... maybe less glorifying your fraternity days (I suspect they weren't as glorious an experience as he pretends) and more talking about physics. Mirrors have nothing to do with east/west/north/up/down/front/back... they are simply - and wait for it - reflecting an image. Off a plane. So the light that comes from the left (your left) seems to originate from ... once again, keep with me here... your left. Top comes from top - and bottom from bottom. The point is that you're conditioned to think that when you see someone, they are oriented differently. We're not evolved to interpret reflections naturally (he kinda says this, but in a totally obscured way). So we mis-interpret what we're seeing. What he said about being squashed-and-pushed-backwards-forwards-with-his-nose-in-his-head is about as useful as a snorting a barrel full of coke to demonstrate that perhaps what you perceive isn't the reality. Ok... we get it... you don't need to start growing psychedelic shrooms to understand that things depend on your personal context. Step outside of that, and we often have a hard time dealing with it.
He's expected to answer questions to do with interactions in layman's terms. This is what the theorists of this unmeasurable Science are still working on, so he's in a bad place here and can't answer, I would rather he'd say that outright. He does pretty well I guess, but spends too much time talking about up and down and points of the compass, and unfortunately he mentions axis, which is what most people find a problem with (the "left and right swap *only*" that he mentions). *There is no axis involved here.* Instead, there's a *plane* - the mirror. Your reflected image looks to you as a projection of yourself would onto the surface. And that is because, by adding an atomic layer of metal, then black, onto glass, the interaction changes completely from instead of not interacting with all the photons coming from everywhere in the room (not just your body), it interacts with almost all in the visible spectrum wavelength.
What keeps a train on the track? Gravity...duh!! But, OK then, what is gravity? The truth is; A comprehensive definition of gravity eludes science to the present day. So, the answer to the question; 'What keeps a train on the track?' is..... .........Nobody really knows. It's the same as saying 'Why is the sky blue?'.....'Because the light from the sky that hits your retina resonates at a frequency you perceive as blue'....This isn't really an answer, but simply a re-statement of the phenomenon the question is concerned with. 'Gravity' is just a word, and tells us nothing of the natural mechanism that holds the train down.
Well there's a thing. Seems my understanding of how mirrors work is BETTER than that of Richard Feynman. Wow! *The mirror doesn't flip. The image appears flipped because you are viewing it from the front. You should be viewing it from the BACK, the way your image in the mirror views it. However, it is only possible to view mirror images from the back if a special kind of semi-silvered mirror is used. Semi-silvered mirrors let some light go right through, enough to allow viewing from behind. The view is then laterally correct, as through a window... (of course.)*
effyleven what it does explain is how the art called Heraldry is in line with physics ... what kind of quest is the knight of the round table on? what it does explain is the reverence the Knights Templar had for St. John the Baptist (more than Jesus) and why his head/skull is a symbol well known to them. Yes how do we connect losing one's head if ye take a trip down MEMEory lane using the Z axis? all of the above suggests the ancients KNEW about the Z axis Alice. yes it also explains why folks noses get bent out of shape when seeing another POV it explains why stepping through the looking glass, traveling up the funnel of a tornado with Dorothy or passing thru the wardrobe in Narnia to another dimension/time is da same thing as travelling along the Z axis which King Richard hinted is the N/S axis so therefore it explains why the ancient Egyptians, the first King meNeS was the first to unify N/S crowns of Egypt, which were WHITE and RED, the same colors as the Templar Cross. I think I know more than both you and the noble Nobel winner King Richard about how profound and important the concept of the mirror is to the human psyche. i.e. I have NEWS for ya can we extract the word NEWS from the four directions NorthEastWestSouth? can we extract the four directions from the name MENES using rotations, reflections, and translations? PhDUH sure can what do ye think the QaBaLaH is all about?
I don't doubt that Feynman was a genius but the average person can understand that mirrors invert right and left. Hell even pigs and cats understand this concept.
Buddy, the thing is, it looks as if the lateral plane is inverted, that's the property of mirrors afterall. But this apparent lateral inversion is due to the inversion of the axis which points towards the mirror, truly gives you a nice perspective to mirrors.
I agree simplicity goes a long way but to pry into the actual mechanism of a system can often be rewarding, if not practically at least for one's own curiousity.
When you look at a mirror, it's quite simple. Everything looks reversed because your right eye is getting things from the right, and the same with the left. Since normally, your right eye sees somebody's left, and same with the left. When you see this way, your eyes are seeing everything flipped horizontally, as there is none of the flip in perspective.
Sorry - it has nothing to do with which eye sees what... it is simply repeating what image falls on the mirror. Imagine that your shadow makes an image on a photo-active screen... the shadow on the left shows on the left. The shadow on the right shows on the right. What you are seeing is not what you would see if you were behind the mirror (looking at you) - but instead what you're seeing is like the left-over trace of a light-shadow on a material. Just one that reflects VERY well.
Omg, nothing is inverted. It's simply a reflection. There's no explaining to be done. The mirror reflects visible light near perfectly. It seems like a "flipped" or "inverted" image because the mirror has the same viewpoint that another person would have if looking at you. The mirror allows you to see your self from the front as others see you. There is no inverting or flipping done. This video was pointless.
how the hell is he a genius..? this is something any normal person could figure out in their brain in a matter of milliseconds..-_- he just explain the whole process that runs through your head
I would have loved to be on a Feynman class...what a great teacher this guy was.
Yep
WHAT KEEPS A TRAIN ON ITS TRACKS!? :O
+Andrew Harper nobody really knows yet, science is working on it. Their best idea is that trains are just really obedient.
+Thomas Brubach seems as though they were trained that way
+Andrew Harper The shape of the wheels
the weight of the train bearing down on the tracks... gravity does the rest
No the question is "What keeps a train on its tracks (during a turn)?" The answer is the wheels are conical, and slide outwards during a turn, giving the inner wheel a smaller circumference to travel less distance in the same time. The differential is taken care of geometrically.
What keeps a train on the track was easier for me to figure out than the mirror one. And he said this is the easier one. So interesting how different people are
anyone else reminded of Robin Williams watchin Feynman
I guess they both had pointy facial features and of course, big imaginations, though they were in different fields, of course. If you're familiar with MBTI, this similarity also makes sense, as Feynman is an ENTP and Robin Williams an ENFP, so their main cognitive function, extroverted intuition, is quite apparent when they are speaking and probably plays a part in you being reminded of the other. Disclaimer: I've heard this through other sources, but it seems plausible to me.
Yes, absolutely. Similar tone, speech, facial expression and smile...
Yeah cause he’s always cracking himself up by what he ends up saying
He reminds me more of Ed Norton from the Honeymooners.
Feynman: THAT was the easy one!
me: .... yeah.... O.O
This blew my mind, thank you
What keeps a train on a track?
Pineapples
Even in his later years, he still has a mischevous smile of a little kid !!!
This Was My Physics Homework -_-
Lovely explanation
I still fail to understand the solution
I love this man’s mind!!!!
I will pray for America. Please pray for me. God Bless you.
@designflaw01 you obviously did not finish the video... It is obvious that the mirror inverts left and right, however what feynman was trying to explain that even though we perceive the left/ right axis to flip it is the one that is pointing into the mirror that actually gets inverted.
This is a misleading response for anyone that ends up here now. the left and right only flip because they're relative measurements and we measure them as if the reflected image was behind the mirror. Since the image behind the mirror is just your image before the mirror reflected back at you left and right doesn't really make any sense, but your brain decides it's needed and makes it up anyways. There's no object behind the mirror that exists in the way it would need to in order for left and right to be meaningful for that object.
You're just seeing your left and right reflected back at you, but because of how the positions relative to the reflection change your brain assigns a meaningless left and right to them that is reverse what it would be in real life.
If you listened, it was a typical problem used in MIT fraternities. And most folks, the answer is only obvious once it is explained.
And the part of genius is to boil a complex problem down to its essentials so that the answer seem easy.
Except he didn't .. he made it about 10x more obscure than it actually is. It's not that it isn't more nuanced - its because it can be explained easily. It's when people intentionally complicate people's innate understanding of the world that I get worried. And I know this is a common question... but it has a simple answer... mirrors reflect your reality, not what your mirror image would see. You raise your left hand, the left-hand side image raises it's hand. Because we're used to people being mostly symmetrical, we don't get it, but are constantly confused by it (because we're used to seeing just 'normal' un-reflected people.... and we just assume a left hand will appear on the right side of a person's image in our eyes). The confusion is biology/evolution... not physics. Coz mirrors aren't something we've evolved around.
@@AdelaideBen1 That is exactly what he explained in the last minute of the video.
@@AdelaideBen1 ADHD much? It's a 3 minute video and you didn't finish it.
I need his brain for my physics and mathematics tests/exams (A) Such a wonderful man
An easy comparison would be to ask a person in front of you to show you the palm of his left hand, and tell him it’s his right hand from your perspective.
WHAT KEEPS THE TRAIN ON THE TRACK?! I WANNA KNOW
@NightshadeMortis 'The mirror allows you to see your self from the front as others see you.'
When others look at me from the front my heart is not on the right.
That's exactly the question I was thinking about a few weeks ago standing in the bath and brushing my teeth:)
TED talks. I like this version better.
This question sounds funny to me;) But he explains in one of this interviews what causes that train does not fall out the track...
I love his sense of humour.
Fml... what keeps the train on the track!? I dont see part 2 in the recommendations
"We don't think of the idea that the person has been pushed and squashed backwards-forwards, because that's not what ordinarily happens to people." Pfft, this guy's never been to Detroit, obviously.
so... what keeps the train on the track?
Happy Teacher's Day sir
What keeps the train on the fucking tracks, Feynman? What keeps the train on the tracks!?
"The harder one is - what keeps the train on the track?" hahah;)
Can anyone explain simply what he means?
lol, i thought of the same question while checking my car's mirrors a few months ago XD
Cool but now I want to know about the train.
They only return from the direction they came when the source of light is perpendicular to the mirror.
Can you explicate this?
I wonder who is the man in the mirror
WHAT KEEPS A TRAIN ON THE TRACK???!!!
...*locks doors*
then, you should read his book: QED!
My answer was light relfection but yeah that answer sounds good... I guess.
It’s ok…I didn’t know either.
I thought he was going to explain how the silvering returns the photons in the direction from which they came.
holy fyenmenn! !
I dont see the problem, a mirrir just reflects
@wowsa0 Well...mine is.
A God sent to help us to evolve...geniale
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
lol 💀
wait, wat
here is the answer you were looking for 2 years ago. i've been thinking about this off and on over the years after reading your comment. check it out --- [ howamirrorworks / tumblr ]
@dhannyboy86 29,202 now
lol same
different from colorblind. im not colorblind. or blind. r u done playing around? tired of running in circles? who can threaten the best?
everyone is mirroring me but you know everything about me.....i think..?........im mirroring YU, but by myself. but solo mode, no more games, its hard for me to mirror in groups. 1v1 is better. meet boodah.
do you need anymore analytical data on boodah? 🤷🏻🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♂️🤦🏿♀️🤦🏽 or just drop down like bjjdkejsnskdklsjjsodofkfdkdkdnkckgks.
WTF is he talking about... maybe less glorifying your fraternity days (I suspect they weren't as glorious an experience as he pretends) and more talking about physics. Mirrors have nothing to do with east/west/north/up/down/front/back... they are simply - and wait for it - reflecting an image. Off a plane. So the light that comes from the left (your left) seems to originate from ... once again, keep with me here... your left. Top comes from top - and bottom from bottom. The point is that you're conditioned to think that when you see someone, they are oriented differently. We're not evolved to interpret reflections naturally (he kinda says this, but in a totally obscured way). So we mis-interpret what we're seeing. What he said about being squashed-and-pushed-backwards-forwards-with-his-nose-in-his-head is about as useful as a snorting a barrel full of coke to demonstrate that perhaps what you perceive isn't the reality. Ok... we get it... you don't need to start growing psychedelic shrooms to understand that things depend on your personal context. Step outside of that, and we often have a hard time dealing with it.
So is Feynman saying here that students at MIT don't understand the angles of incidence and reflection?
He's expected to answer questions to do with interactions in layman's terms. This is what the theorists of this unmeasurable Science are still working on, so he's in a bad place here and can't answer, I would rather he'd say that outright.
He does pretty well I guess, but spends too much time talking about up and down and points of the compass, and unfortunately he mentions axis, which is what most people find a problem with (the "left and right swap *only*" that he mentions). *There is no axis involved here.* Instead, there's a *plane* - the mirror.
Your reflected image looks to you as a projection of yourself would onto the surface. And that is because, by adding an atomic layer of metal, then black, onto glass, the interaction changes completely from instead of not interacting with all the photons coming from everywhere in the room (not just your body), it interacts with almost all in the visible spectrum wavelength.
What keeps a train on the track?
Gravity...duh!!
But, OK then, what is gravity?
The truth is; A comprehensive definition of gravity eludes science to the present day. So, the answer to the question; 'What keeps a train on the track?' is.....
.........Nobody really knows.
It's the same as saying 'Why is the sky blue?'.....'Because the light from the sky that hits your retina resonates at a frequency you perceive as blue'....This isn't really an answer, but simply a re-statement of the phenomenon the question is concerned with. 'Gravity' is just a word, and tells us nothing of the natural mechanism that holds the train down.
Well there's a thing. Seems my understanding of how mirrors work is BETTER than that of Richard Feynman. Wow!
*The mirror doesn't flip. The image appears flipped because you are viewing it from the front. You should be viewing it from the BACK, the way your image in the mirror views it. However, it is only possible to view mirror images from the back if a special kind of semi-silvered mirror is used. Semi-silvered mirrors let some light go right through, enough to allow viewing from behind. The view is then laterally correct, as through a window... (of course.)*
effyleven
what it does explain is how the art called Heraldry is in line with physics ...
what kind of quest is the knight of the round table on?
what it does explain is the reverence the Knights Templar had for St. John the Baptist (more than Jesus) and why his head/skull is a symbol well known to them.
Yes how do we connect losing one's head if ye take a trip down MEMEory lane using the Z axis?
all of the above suggests the ancients KNEW about the Z axis Alice.
yes it also explains why folks noses get bent out of shape when seeing another POV
it explains why stepping through the looking glass, traveling up the funnel of a tornado with Dorothy or passing thru the wardrobe in Narnia to another dimension/time is da same thing as travelling along the Z axis which King Richard hinted is the N/S axis
so therefore it explains why the ancient Egyptians, the first King meNeS was the first to unify N/S crowns of Egypt, which were WHITE and RED, the same colors as the Templar Cross.
I think I know more than both you and the noble Nobel winner King Richard about how profound and important the concept of the mirror is to the human psyche.
i.e. I have NEWS for ya
can we extract the word NEWS from the four directions NorthEastWestSouth?
can we extract the four directions from the name MENES using rotations, reflections, and translations?
PhDUH
sure can
what do ye think the QaBaLaH is all about?
Archangel Raphael No. You are wrong in every way. Sorry, fellah! What you need is a long walk in the fresh air.
Archangel Raphael Do I know where my avatar originated? I damn well ought to. I shot it for myself, you poor enfeebled onanist.
+effyleven
"The image appears flipped because you are viewing it from the front."
That's the whole point. That's the phenomenon.
Taxtro Your point being what, pray?
I don't doubt that Feynman was a genius but the average person can understand that mirrors invert right and left. Hell even pigs and cats understand this concept.
Buddy, the thing is, it looks as if the lateral plane is inverted, that's the property of mirrors afterall. But this apparent lateral inversion is due to the inversion of the axis which points towards the mirror, truly gives you a nice perspective to mirrors.
I agree simplicity goes a long way but to pry into the actual mechanism of a system can often be rewarding, if not practically at least for one's own curiousity.
When you look at a mirror, it's quite simple. Everything looks reversed because your right eye is getting things from the right, and the same with the left. Since normally, your right eye sees somebody's left, and same with the left. When you see this way, your eyes are seeing everything flipped horizontally, as there is none of the flip in perspective.
No, Feynman gives the correct answer to the question. The only thing the gets flipped is the Z-axis. Our eyes have nothing to do with it.
Sorry - it has nothing to do with which eye sees what... it is simply repeating what image falls on the mirror. Imagine that your shadow makes an image on a photo-active screen... the shadow on the left shows on the left. The shadow on the right shows on the right. What you are seeing is not what you would see if you were behind the mirror (looking at you) - but instead what you're seeing is like the left-over trace of a light-shadow on a material. Just one that reflects VERY well.
Omg, nothing is inverted. It's simply a reflection. There's no explaining to be done. The mirror reflects visible light near perfectly. It seems like a "flipped" or "inverted" image because the mirror has the same viewpoint that another person would have if looking at you. The mirror allows you to see your self from the front as others see you. There is no inverting or flipping done. This video was pointless.
Sometimes this guy makes no sense. I wish in his later days he didn't become some so pedantic and full of himself.
how the hell is he a genius..?
this is something any normal person could figure out in their brain in a matter of milliseconds..-_-
he just explain the whole process that runs through your head