A different universe in the mirror

I was completely stumped when I came across the following question:

Why does a mirror reflect left and right, but not up and down?

I thought about this question for about 3 hours. I searched the internet for explanations, and I should warn you that practically all of them are incorrect, or miss the point entirely. It is almost an embarrassing question to think about. If I had been asked this question in person, I would probably have shot off a self-assured "explanation" out of vanity, before returning to the privacy of my room to reconsider it.

Many things dawned upon me as I contemplated what it all meant. My conclusion is that there is a different universe on the other side of the mirror. It is a universe of a distinctly different quality from ours. By this, I mean that we cannot mimic that universe without using a mirror (or something similar) in the first place. There are, in quite a literal sense, two universes, and the mirror is the conceptual impassable border between the two. Maybe I am completely off, so please let me know if you have a satisfactory answer to this question.

Of course, your reflection on the other side is contemplating the exact same thing as you are.

Dear SUSY... where are you?

What do bankers and theoretical physicists have in common?

Quite a lot possibly.

Theoretical physics has a certain public image, and quite a distorted one. There are fads, figureheads and fashionable fields. Undoubtedly the most in-vogue field is string theory, or its newer incarnation superstring theory, or the latest release, M-theory. Most people have heard something about string theory, either from watching the Big Bang Theory, or reading some popular science book by Stephen Hawking, or from general philosophical discussions about life, the universe, and everything.

It is really remarkable how the media and social environment dictates research even in a field like theoretical physics -- which purports to provide us with universal truth. String theory is, as far as I know, most dominant in the United States. It has the same sort of philosophy as American free-market capitalism. It has the vagueness of the American Dream. It has rock-star spokespeople that the young geeky types idolize. It also has the arrogance of American imperialism. It is also hated by more conservative physicists elsewhere.

I am not even exaggerating the extent of the divide that splits the world of theoretical physics. It goes much deeper, with shady businesses with government funding agencies and media moguls. What does this mean for this poor student who is navigating the murky waters in search for the right answers? Who should one believe, the confident string theorist whose mathematical prowess and alluring charm puts church pastors to shame, or the reticent, white-bearded professor who still speaks fondly of Einstein, Pauli, and Heisenberg?

I can't form an informed opinion with my modest understanding of string theory, and truth-be-told, there is a great fear of being left out on the deepest, most beautiful theory ever crafted. In all honesty, I have not been able to appreciate any of the depth in string theory, although there is purportedly a Holy Grail locked up somewhere in the minds of a company of select geniuses which one might gain access to after decades of dedicated study.

There are unsettling, and often unspoken problems at the root of theoretical physics. There are outlandish claims and false promises. There are deep philosophical questions left behind by Einstein that most physicists avoid. There is also my little issue with real numbers and their correspondence to reality. There is the irresistible irony of the brainwashed theoretical high-energy physicist who borrows sophisticated mathematical tools to build his gauge-field-theories-which-predicts-the-"God"-particle-now-build-me-my-Large-Hadron-Collider, but dismisses the nit-picky student who asks him what is so canonical about "canonical quantization." "We're doing, physics," he says, "not mathematics".

You will probably have heard about the Large Hadron Collider --  that atom-smasher that houses the most expensive experiment ever built. If you are slightly more interested, you will also know that it is supposed to nail down the Higgs boson (the God-particle I alluded to earlier on). You are probably wondering why this is such a big deal. If I were a particle physicist, I will regurgitate the gospel that it will validate out best fundamental theories, and bring us closer to our dream of finding GUTs (grand-unified theories) or TOEs (theories of everything). I will even extol the machine's unprecedented ability to find squarks, Higgsinos, and gluinos, particles that SUSY predicts.

As you nod your head politely while listening to my unintelligible attempts at justifying my existence, your most pertinent question is probably "Who is Susie?"

SUSY stands for "supersymmetry", which some might have you believe is the most beautiful feature of the Universe that its Creator endowed it with. There is only one problem. The LHC has not found it. And now, literally, theoretical physics is baring its ugly fangs as researchers declare war on each other's intellect.

It pains a little me to say this, but science is really quite a dishonest business. There is too little self-criticism, and too much peacockry. There is certainly nothing absolute about it, nor is anything ever "scientifically proven". Meanwhile, allow me to express my doubts about black holes, superstrings, multiverses, evolution, the Human Genome Project, natural selection, quantum computers, the Big Bang, probability and the scientific method, before I return to the 26-dimensional space-time of bosonic strings.