As a neurologist i have always been interested in handedness. Left handed persons are in the minority by about 5 or 6 to one. Though I can well understand why the hemispheres of the brain like all other parts of the brain specialize, ordinarily the left hemisphere for language, it is hard to fathom the excess of right handed individuals.

As it turns out not only humans, but practically everything may be classified as being right or left handed. This goes especially for the most elementary of particles in physics, the quarks. Quarks are conceived of pointing either up or down (like thumbs up or down) and to have a spin that conforms to the fingers with your thumb up of either your right and left hand so to be either, by that criterion, right or left handed. I am fascinated by the fact that just about every object is chiral, that is, it resembles the right or left human hand. What establishes this chirality, is whether or not the object turns out to be superimposable when you see it in a mirror. A few three dimensional objects are symmetric about a plane and are thus achiral, that is they will not be thought of being either right or left handed but these are very few. Around one quarter of identical twin pairs are mirror images. This relates to how late they separated in embryonic development, the later the separation, after organs developed, the more mirror images they are, a characteristic that can range from opposite vortices of their hair swirls to fingerprints all the way to situs inversus of their hearts where one points right, the other left on their chest x-rays.

I imagine that at some ancient time in the primordial universe there was an equal number of right and left handed objects, while at our present non-ideal state of development, there is a large excess of one type, mostly right handed humans and right handed conch shells. It seems to me there is no reason why this should be the case and at one time there was a Garden of Eden, or better, a beautiful Parthenon like symmetry that was at once broken with the beginning of our World, much like the universal symmetry-breaking described in physics and the separation of matter and antimatter, there being in our corner of Things a large excess of matter. The mirror thus gives us some view of this idyllic beautiful primordial world and the certain knowledge that for every object there exists another one reflected in the mirror of equal and opposite handedness.