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Alice Through the (Convex) Looking Glass*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2016
Extract
- OH, wad some power the giftie gi’e us
- To see oursels as others see us,
- It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
- And foolish notion;
in which case it is probable that wars would cease. During the last few years we have had glimpses of ourselves through the spectacles of the Central Powers; occasionally through the telescopes of the French, the Italians, or the Russians, and in the near future we are likely to get a good many pictures of ourselves as we appear to the last-named people. We are apt to think that our own view of ourselves is the only true view, and all other images are in error just as they differ from our own standard. Naturally other nations adopt the same course, and we are free to believe that in many cases their vision of themselves is far more at fault than our own self image. In this respect a study of Alice and her standards might be not without profit to the nations. When we want to see ourselves, or, at least, our faces, we usually employ a mirror, and what we see depends very much on the mirror we use. Sir George Greenhill was the first professor of Applied Mathematics at the Eoyal Indian Civil Engineering College, Coopers’ Hill. He told us that at the end of the first session a reception was held and the science departments were on view. A young lady entering the physical laboratory and seeing an inverted image of herself in a large concave mirror naively remarked to her companion, “They have hung that looking glass upside down.” But those who fixed the mirror were not to blame, as the lady would have discovered had she advanced past the centre of the curvature. The reply of modern mathematics to the prayer of Eobert Burns is the Theory of Relativity I have some doubt whether Burns would have appreciated the answer. As a rule, we use a plane mirror to inspect ourselves. This reverses certain spatial relations which can be expressed best, perhaps, by stating that it presents a right-handed screw as a left-handed screw and vice versû, or changes a wine screw into a beer screw, as Clerk Maxwell would say, referring to the tendrils of the vine and the hop.
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- Copyright © Mathematical Association 1908
Footnotes
This “Presidential Address” was written for the purpose of providing an hour’s relaxation, and not as a contribution to Mathematical Science or with any view to publication. If it has any merits, they are to be found exclusively from the point of view of Elementary Education in so far as it offers an easy introduction to the conception of variable units of space and mass, and so prepares the mind for the Theory of Relativity.
References
* This “Presidential Address” was written for the purpose of providing an hour’s relaxation, and not as a contribution to Mathematical Science or with any view to publication. If it has any merits, they are to be found exclusively from the point of view of Elementary Education in so far as it offers an easy introduction to the conception of variable units of space and mass, and so prepares the mind for the Theory of Relativity.