“Yo temo ahora que el espejo encierre el verdadero rostro de mi alma, lastimada de sombras y culpas, el que Dios ve y acaso ven los hombres” Jorge Luis Borges
(Now I am afraid that the mirror stores the true face of my soul, hurt by shadows and guilt complexes, the one that God sees and perhaps men do too)
Since our times in those dark, humid, eerie caves, we, humans, have been totally mesmerized by the reflection of our image on the water surfaces. In many cultures, the appearance of a clear image is a foreboding of good tidings. And the contrary… Not until Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, invented the mirror in 1835 did we have a reliable way to reflect any images; he developed a technique of applying a thin layer of silver to one side of a piece of glass to create a reflective surface.
Considering that we attribute supernatural powers to things we cannot understand, mirrors have gained a reputation of being some kind of “reflections of the truth.” The idea that a broken mirror brings seven years of bad luck originates in the Roman belief that the human soul took seven years to renew itself; in the same vein, the right way to void the pending misfortune is to bury the glass fragments deep in the ground. For some cultures—foremost of all, the quaint beliefs of small towns in Sicily—when a member of the family passes away, all the mirrors in the house must be covered with black drapes so the spirit of the dead cannot re-enter our reality. All the film buffs know that the soul-less vampires do not have a mirror reflection. Actors are wary of discovering their reflection while looking on another’s shoulder.
Do mirrors constitute a portal to another world, parallel to our reality?
In the 1990s, particle physicists were measuring the time it took for neutron particles to break down into protons once they were removed from an atom’s nucleus. In an article in The Independent, Harry Cockburn said: “Two separate experiments saw the neutrons broke down at differing rates, instead of decaying and becoming protons at exactly the same rate, as was expected. In one the free neutrons were captured by magnetic fields and herded into laboratory, and in the other they were detected by the subsequent appearance of proton particles from a nuclear reactor stream. Those particles fired out in the stream from the nuclear reactor lived on average for 14 minutes and 48 seconds—nine seconds later than those form the bottle traps.” This phenomenon might be explained by a mirror-world world where some neutrons migrate before coming back to our world and emit a detectable proton.
In a previous article, we already discussed the NASA experiment that sought to measure the scientific data that could form the basis of a parallel world, besides ours. In an article in USA Today, Matthew Brown refuted the theory that a parallel universe existed, solely based on the NASA findings in the Antarctica. He said: “the recent ANITA does not have any findings that support the ‘antiverse’ idea, known to physicists as the CPT Symmetry Universe. Researchers affiliated with the project have offered scenarios ranging for scientists needing to update their models about the Antarctic ice to decaying super heavy dark matter in the Milky Way.” This author said that it is misleadingly false to claim that a parallel universe exists based on this.
We confess that we have always been leery of mirrors of nay kind, especially those tall ones that go from the floor to almost the ceiling level. A few years ago we visited briefly an apartment to rent where the living room was framed by tall mirrors on all sides. After a few minutes, we promptly skedaddled back to the safety of our familiarly boring reality, where the parameters are known.
Parallel worlds? No, thank you very much. We like this world just fine, even with its many defects.
Stay distant. Stay safe. Stay beautiful.
What do you think? Please tell us.
Don’t leave me alone.