how come mirror image does not have an up/down reversal of your image?

Question

i was just wondering because the mirror always has a left/right reversal of your image.

Answer 1

Actually, there is NO reversal. Its a reflection. Stand with ur back against the mirror, there isnt a reversal. There is no possible way to, when you look into a mirror, see your back. The front of you is facing the mirror, so the front will be reflected. Unless you want the mirror to wave your right hand when you wave your left? But thats not exactly a reflection... thats just wierd. The mirror reflects EVERYTHING, not just you, so there isnt a reversal.

Answer 2

good quetion!
When looking in your rear-view mirror, objects in front of the mirror
(as seen in the image in the mirror) are reversed left and right, but
not up and down. Why are left and right reversed, but up and down
are not? To answer this commonly-asked question, we need to first
answer the question: "Reversed relative to what?" From the context
of the original question we can infer that it refers to the image in
the rear-view mirror being reversed relative to the image we would
see if we turned around and looked directly out the back window. If
so, then the answer depends on HOW we would turn around. Most likely
we would rotate our field of view about a vertical axis, so the image
we see will be reversed laterally (left-to-right). Of course, if we
turn about a horizontal axis (difficult to do in a car, but not
impossible), the image we see would be reversed top-to-bottom.

Another answer that is often given to this question is that mirrors
reverse neither left-to-right nor top-to-bottom, they reverse front-
to-back. This is actually the answer to a slightly different question
than the one asked above, but it's such a cute answer that many people
can't resist giving it whenever anyone asks anything about mirror
images.

The reason there are consistently conflicting answers to "the mirror
question" is partly due to the fact that the question is often poorly
expressed, so that it can be construed in several different ways.
The ambiguity is two-fold, because, first, the question often doesn't
explicitly identify the two things that are posited to be "reversals"
of each other, and second, the question often doesn't define the
intended sense of "left" and "right", i.e., as relative directions
or as designations of "handedness"

Answer 3

There is no reversal at all. Move close you can see that your right eye is looking into your right eye.
And you left eye is looking into your left eye. But relative to the facing direction of the image the right is now on the left and the left is on the right. So what has happened is it changed the facing direction without turning you around causing a single axis reversal.

Answer 4

Lateral inversion but no vertical inversion.

I don't know. And I have been teaching physics in high school for many years.

I suppose that one could say that that's just the way it happens. Something like why dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) does not become a liquid when heated but changes directly to a gas.