Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Copeland
I feel like that third-grader. You ask her how many flowers the girl sees. The third-grader answers, “One” (as some of us did), and you say, “No, eight!”
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That's not how it works. Third-graders give different answers: 1,4, infinity. Then we consider the case of 2 mirrors and draw pictures. Kids argue and eventually convince each other that it is 4: by someone explicitly drawing the 4 trajectories of the light ray from the flower to the eye (and finding a universal way of drawing them all). Then it becomes clear to everyone in class that in the 3-space the answer is 8 (though it is hard to draw pictures), and in the 4-space 16, and so on.