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They do it with mirrors (Posted on 2006-04-26) Difficulty: 3 of 5
If I stand in front of a mirror, the light takes a finite, albeit small, amount of time to reach my eye.

So I am seeing myself as I looked some small fraction of time in the past.

Now if I stand with a second mirror behind me, I can see an infinite number of images of myself, each slightly older.

If I had my arm raised, and then I lowered it, can I still see an image of myself with raised arm?

No Solution Yet Submitted by goFish    
Rating: 3.8000 (5 votes)

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Some Thoughts After a bit of reflection... | Comment 7 of 8 |
If "seeing" is simply defined as a mental representation created
by a visual aspect, then the answer is it is possible.

Though light travels at near light speed in the non-vacuum medium of air, and the speed of lowering one's arm is very much slower than the reflected light. The chemical processes of the optic nerves and brain that captures the image is relatively variable. An image processed by the brain of the raised arm, and the image processed by the brain of the lowered arm is dependant on the cumulative processes of the synapses that processes the particular image, each can fire at relatively different rates as they are not all identical. Some synapses are of different lengths, and the chemical and elemental structures may differ by slight alterations or aberrations. The speed of the processed raised-arm image may have occured slower than that of the processed lowered-arm image, and thus the mental image of the lowered-arm may still be "seen" alongside the mental image of the raised-arm image.  
  Posted by Dej Mar on 2015-05-24 22:24:16
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