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ON BOTH SIDE OF THE MIRROR
Yu. M. Brook
“The first thing he saw in the morning when he woke up was Tigger, who was sitting in front of the mirror, fixed on his reflection.
- Good morning! - said Pooh.
- Good morning! - said Tigger. “Look, there’s someone here, just like me. And I thought I was the only one like that.”
A. A. Mill. “Winnie the Pooh and everything - everything”
“Once upon a time there was a troll, angry and contemptuous; it was the Lionwolf himself. Once he was in a particularly good mood between the two: he made such a mirror in which everything good and beautiful was diminished to the utmost, yet the worthless and ugly, on the contrary, caught the eye and seemed even worse.” This is how the tale of the Scalding Queen begins.
We became acquainted with this fairy tale by the famous Danish fairy tale Hans Christin Andersen when we were very young. And with a mirror, probably even earlier. The mirror is without a doubt the most common physical device. It is in every home. It would not be too much to say that every day, spontaneously or involuntarily, we look at our image more than once. People learned to make mirrors several thousand years ago. But what mirrors do is described in Irwin Gliok’s book, which is called: “And mirrors do it all.” The book was published by the Mir publishing house in 1970. Everyone who reads it will receive great comfort, will look at known things in a different way and will certainly learn something new for themselves.
Photography and astronomy, medicine and navigation, space technology and precision (high-precision) measurements of physical quantities require mirrors that are very different in purpose and design. The first mirrors created by people were metal - after all, man learned to use good, shiny metals earlier than to make glass. However, glass mirrors are also older - they were made already one and a half millennia BC. Mass production of glass mirrors at calLOB, but later, during the Italian Renaissance. In Venice, mirrors were made by applying amalgam - a paste-like mixture of tin and mercury - to the glass. Venetian technological coolness to the present day.
In the book, I. Glioka explains in detail how the manufacture of mirrors acquired greater scientific significance after the invention of the telescope and microscope at the beginning of the 17th century. True, first optical instruments did without mirrors. But a little later, a reflective teleskop was invented, now known as the Newtonian reflector. Let us remember that there are at least two reasons why reflecting telescopes are preferred over refracting telescopes. However, one of them is that the lenses decompose white light, a colored edge appears on the image, and it is blurred. The second reason is that lenses, especially large ones, are difficult to grind. It is not entirely accurate to say that the idea of a telescope-reflector came from Newton and that in 1672 Newton came to the conclusion that it was necessary to make a telescope-refractor that would satisfy the observed distances of stars. Indeed, James Gregory is considered the inventor of the mirror telescope in the history of physics. He proposed a device for such a telescope back in 1663, but was unable to build this instrument. The reflector was first built by Isaac Newton,