• @[email protected]
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    4315 days ago

    Would this work? I think the light stops at the mirror because it’s silver.

    Normally

    1. Light hits the vampire.
    2. It bounces off their body.
    3. It hits the mirror
    4. It reflects from the mirror into your eyes.

    Silver mirror

    1. Light hits the vampire.
    2. It bounces off their body (now unholy light)
    3. It hits the mirror and gets absorbed
    4. Light doesn’t make it to your eyes

    So, technically, there really should be a vampire-shaped hole in the mirror where the vampire was.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 days ago

      If I’m standing next to a vampire and give them the shirt off my back, does my shirt turn invisible in the mirror when they put it on?

      If a vampire gives me their shirt, at what point does it become visible in the mirror?

      What if the vampire is wearing a rope- can they spool out a hundred feet of mirror-invisible rope as long as some is on their body?

      I feel there’s a ton of applications for vampires- optics use mirrors a lot, can they wear a vehicle/tank/ship/etc and make it invisible to optics that utilize mirrors?

      • @[email protected]
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        15 days ago

        Well, if we treat incoming light as a quantum superposition:

        |light⟩ = α|holy⟩ + β|unholy⟩

        …and assume that vampires reflect only unholy light and absorb holy light, then anything directly part of the vampire’s “system” filters light this way.

        So I guess the question becomes, “How does the filtering happen?” Is it by physical surface, or is there some kind of quantum holiness field that absorbs holy light nearby?

        • CodexArcanum
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          15 days ago

          So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn’t (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire’s reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?

    • Troy
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      2515 days ago

      The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 days ago

        You have added The Unholy Spectroscope to your inventory.

        The concept of unholy light seems to imply vampires can be detected through unholy spectroscopy.

    • Fargeol
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      114 days ago

      I always thought it was a quantum effect: light is passing through the vampire and bouncing on it at the same time and it’s only when you observe its predicted path that you’ll project it in a defined state.

      But, from your point of view, light “knew” from the beginning that it had to pass through the vampire or bounce on it.

      • @[email protected]
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        214 days ago

        I don’t think the light “knew” from the beginning. The light started in a state of superposition, right? Both unholy and holy. Once it hits the vampire, only the unholy light is reflected, acting like a sort of filter similar to a polarizing lens.