What is chirality? Mirror-image forms with Jess Wade #shorts #science #chirality #scienceexplained

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]You can you can kind of see that the beetle's got this really beautiful green color. And if I put the 3D cinema glasses in front of the beetle through this lens, you can still see that beautiful color. But this lens lets through absolutely no color at all.

[00:00:13]These beetles have a structure in their shell, which is chyal. So every single layer of the material in this shell is twisted a little bit with respect to the layer below. Chyal objects exist as a pair of non-supimposable mirror images um like your left and your right hand.

[00:00:28]And so that's a kind of fancy way of saying if you put your hands together palm to palm they're mirror images of each other. But if you put one on top of the other, no matter how much you rotate your top hand, it's not a mirror image of your bottom hand. We see kirality in light. This is this is kind of hard to get our heads around because we can't tell whether light is left or right-handed with our eyes. Luckily, these little um 3D cinema glasses can tell. You can you can kind of see that the beetle's got this really beautiful green color. So it's kind of got this almost iridescent green color. And if I put the 3D cinema glasses in front of the beetle through this lens, you can still see that beautiful color. So that lens is letting through the color of the beetle shell. But this lens, which lets through the other handedness of light, lets through absolutely no color at all.

[00:01:14]So what's happening in this beetle is that chyal nanoructure is reflecting chyal light and then only one of these lenses lets that light through and the other lens only lets the other handedness through which isn't reflecting at all. Um so so nature has this really beautiful control of kirality.