A look in the mirror: what does it show us - and what does it hide? | Translation

A lecture by Johannes Grebe-Ellis

February 16, 2024, 8 pm CET, Goetheanum

As familiar as the mirror is to us in everyday life, we easily get stuck when we start to ask: Where do we see our reflection - on the mirror, in front of it or behind it? Why does the mirror only swap right and left and not also up and down? Is the mirror deceptive? If these and similar questions are not to be answered theoretically, but from visual experience itself, remembering the law of reflection from physics lessons will not help. Is it possible to develop the law of the mirror based on experience, i.e. from looking into the mirror itself? What kind of seeing would we have to develop for this? We can find answers to this question in art. Artists have always been interested in reflections. We may have learned what an image is from the mirror image. - In this lecture, the physical perspective of the mirror is contrasted with artistic views. In simple experiments, we give mirrors the opportunity to answer our questions and gather experiences in the mirror space.

Johannes Grebe-Ellis, Professor of Physics and its Didactics at the University of Wuppertal. Born in 1967, Waldorf School in Kassel and Vienna, carpentry apprenticeship at Fa. Poth in the Odenwald, studied physics and philosophy in Tübingen, scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation, diploma thesis on the quantum field theory of superconductivity with Harald Stumpf on "Effective Hamiltonian operators of the BCS model"; Research assistant with Manfred von Mackensen at the Pedagogical Research Center in Kassel, worked as a teacher of physics and mathematics at various schools, doctorate with Lutz-Helmut Schön at the Institute of Physics at Humboldt University in Berlin on "Fundamentals of a Phenomenology of Optical Polarization"; substitute professor of Phenomenology and Didactics of Physics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, since 2011 at the University of Wuppertal; 2012-2022 member of the board of the German Color Center e. V., 2015-2021 Head of the Association for Didactics of Physics in the German Physical Society; co-editor of the book series "Phenomenology in Natural Science".

Further information and publications: https://www.physikdidaktik.uni-wuppertal.de/de/personen/prof-dr-johannes-grebe-ellis/