"If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduciton of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object -- to the eyes of man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calcuable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye."
-- Flann O'Brien. The Third Policeman. p. 64. --> a novel that is plotted like a trip to the science museum. Much of the book is taken up with a series of episodes in which the police exhibit various physical phenomena to the narrator's growing wonder and fear.
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