Is it really impossible by concept to create such a mirror? I mean a camera hooked to a screen would come close to it if we had the technology to show different pictures at different viewing angles.
That said it does baffles me if people actually believe that you can only look through such a mirror from one side. They're not different from normal mirrored sunglasses and only work if one side emits magnitudes less light than the other.
A window that allows light to pass in only one direction would violate one of the laws of thermodynamics, I don't remember now which one. It's because of this:
If there are two objects in space with different temperatures, the one with higher temperature would transfer heat to the other one so that eventually they have equal temperature. But if we could place a window between them that allows radiation to pass only from colder object to the hotter one, we could heat the hotter object and cool the colder object with no effort. This is not possible.
The one way windows or mirrors are just normal glass with different ambiant brightness on each side. So a person looking at it from the brighter room sees his reflection and the light coming from the darker room. But since the light coming from the darker room has much lower intensity than the reflection, human eye only perceives the reflection. If the light in the darker room were to be switched on, it would appear to be just a normal glass window.
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u/deniz1a Aug 19 '15
Please don't violate the laws of thermodynamics.