On January 19, 2011, I found an online article about Feynman [Ref. 1]. In the beginning, it reads:
Caltech hosted its first-ever TED-X conference last Friday, with talks by a diverse lineup of speakers all celebrating famed physicist Richard Feynman: the scientist, the explorer, the visionary, the wacky eccentric, the brilliant explainer of complex topics, and above all, the raconteur.
Richard Feynman at the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1984; via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license
This article is a must-read for Feynman fans, and I am sure that the person who is not yet a Feynman fan would also become one after reading it. To express my little thought about Feynman, I wrote the following words in its comment section:
The publication of our paper that might supersede Feynman’s explanation of the mirror puzzle was regrettably made after his passing. It would have been quite pleasant to talk with him about this puzzle.
By “our paper” in the above quote, I meant Ref. 2. The mirror puzzle is a famous teaser expressed as: “Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not top and bottom?” Feynman answered this puzzle in his MIT fraternity days. Gleick introduces it in his book [Ref. 3] as follows:
We think of our image as another person. We cannot image ourselves 'squashed' back to front, so we imagine ourselves turned left and right, as if had walked around a pane of glass to face the other way. It is this psychological turnabout that left and right are switched.
I wrote the essence of our answer in our papers [Refs. 2, 4] on the Quora site in reply to a question posted there (it reappeared in The Huffington Post, October 30, 2014, and I reproduced it in Ref. 5). Note that the title of the first of our papers [Ref. 2] has the phrase, "explained without recourse to psychological processes," contrary to Feynman's answer.
References
“TED-X Caltech pays tribute to Feynman.” Discovery, News (January 18, 2011). [The original link was unavailable when I revised this post, but a duplicate version is at https://www.seeker.com/ted-x-caltech-pays-tribute-to-feynman-1765165988.html.
T. Tabata and S. Okuda, “Mirror reversal simply explained without recourse to psychological processes.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, pp. 170–173 (2000).
J. Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon, New York, 1992) p. 331.
H. Yoshimura and T. Tabata, “Relationship between frames of reference and mirror-image reversals.” Perception 36, pp. 1049–1056 (2007).
T. Tabata, “Answer to Quora Site Question: Why does a mirror reverse things horizontally but not vertically?”[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283347839_Answer_to_Quora_Site_Question_Why_does_a_mirror_reverse_things_horizontally_but_not_vertically].
Note added to the revised version: This short article originally had the title “Feynman and the Mirror Puzzle” and appeared at https://ideaisaacjoking.blogspot.com/2011/01/feynman-and-mirror-puzzle.html on January 23, 2011. It has been one of my most viewed posts (2.56-k views). In the version given here, I made minor additions and changes.
Appendix
In revising this post, I found the YouTube video (11 min 8 sec) of probably an introductory session of the TED-X Caltech conference mentioned in Ref. 1 and embed it below.
Another conference video available on YouTube is “My Friend Richard Feynman” by Leonard Susskind (14 min 25 sec) [https://www.ted.com/talks/leonard_susskind_my_friend_richard_feynman].
Among TED “Best of the Web” pick videos, we find “Physics is Fun to Imagine” by Richard Feynman (BBC TV, 1983; 7 min 6 sec) [https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_feynman_physics_is_fun_to_imagine].
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