Can someone please put a vampire in a Michelson interferometer and see what happens?
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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This belongs in What We Do In The Shadows.
Vampires also have ultra instance senses, so they don't need to look.behind them
Something a vampire-hunter might say 🤔
I'll keep this in mind if I ever become a vampire.
As I recall, the "Vampires have no reflection" stemmed from mirrors of the time usually being polished silver. So, I guess the vampire can do this if they're okay with having silver pressed up against their face.
How does that guy with smoke coming out of his eye patch always know when I'm sneaking up on him?? At night. While he's screaming.
Clearly, because he's part bat, the screaming is a kind of echolocation.
Tbf the silver is behind the layer of glass
Pretty sure they just poured silver nitrate over glass. You can still buy kits to do that to re-silver old mirrors for the original look. From what I can find, the layered ones were older, and they used tin and mercury which made breaking a mirror a rather unlucky event.
I'm sure there are varying methods, but typically you silver the back of glass to make a mirror
I think you are right. I keep finding different ways they did it, so sounds like the 1800s was a busy period in the development of mirror technology!
Huh, so 7 years bad luck was actually just heavy metal poisoning? Fascinating...
I always heard it was about not having a soul.
Good myths have multiple ramifications
Can confirm. I'm not a vampire but I sold my soul for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos back im 6th grade. Since then I haven't seen my reflection or been able to use an automatic door.
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Would this work? I think the light stops at the mirror because it's silver.
Normally
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body.
- It hits the mirror
- It reflects from the mirror into your eyes.
Silver mirror
- Light hits the vampire.
- It bounces off their body (now unholy light)
- It hits the mirror and gets absorbed
- 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.
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.
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.
Not enough research to support this claim.
Studies seem to show that onlookers see a reflection of everyone and everything BUT the vampire without any vampire-shaped losses of light showing up on the objects behind the vampire; as evidenced in Brooks’s 1995 documentary. Also important to note is that the vampire's shadow is also missing from the mirror's reflection, but it's visible when viewing the vampire directly.
From the same documentary, we learn that vampires do have shadows, but it raises doubts as to if the vampire casts a shadow of their own; this could instead be evidence that a vampire's shadow is an entirely sentient entity somehow tied to the vampire's corporeal form.
Based on this, I believe that we'd need more research into the existence and form of a vampire's shadow and the possibility that the silver of a mirror wholly negates or even rejects unholy light. Before making such baseless and reckless claims, you consider how your own xenophobic and, frankly, teraphobic or demonophobic biases are likely hurting members of the inmortua community.
Thank you for this serious research 🙏
I'm nothing if not dangerously committed to incredibly bad science
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The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.
COMPUTERS ARE VAMPIRES?!
The world is a vampire. Computers are part of the world. Therefore, computers are vampires.
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Will you DM a game for me?
You have added The Unholy Spectroscope to your inventory.
The concept of unholy light seems to imply vampires can be detected through unholy spectroscopy.
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Do vampires cast a shadow? Because if they cast a shadow, would they actually be able to see through themselves in a mirror, or would they just see a big void in the shape of their body as the light from behind them hits their body but not the mirror? 🤔
Idk about vampire lore but if they are invisible in mirror it means light passes through them undisturbed and therefore they shouldn't cast a shadow. But with the same logic they would be invisible altogether so it being exclusive to mirrors is a wild thing...
I always thought the lore was that they could not see themselves in a mirror and that was misinterpreted as they did not have a reflection. First one could just be a mental block or they just don't recognize their reflections as themselves.
yeah that would really make much more sense than the other one
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The better solution
Bicycle vamps
I thought all of their clothes disappear in mirrors, too. Or what about water that they're drinking...
Vampires drink blood, not water...
Surely, they must take in fluids besides blood, right? Otherwise they'd shrivel up!
Actually when irl blood feeders (such as vampire bats) feed, they need to constantly keep pissing while sucking blood, so as not to burst from the volume of liquid they're feeding off of.
Because blood is relatively nutrition poor. Just mostly water with an irony taste. (Uh.. I wouldn't know personally ofc. Uhm, a friend told me. A human friend, as all we humans have.)
Blood is mostly water.
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