Chiral houses

Some years ago, I went to a talk about Feng Shui (well, really I was dragged along by some friends). It was moderately interesting, but half the things they said were common sense (when planning how to arrange furniture in your home, think about how you will be moving about the space, what times of day the sunlight will be coming through the windows, that sort of thing) and the other half of they were saying were clearly pseudo-scientific nonsense.

One of the things they claimed (that I disagreed with) was that the ideal layout of one's home would be a great deal less ideal in mirror image, and that the ideal layout for a man would (all other things being equal) be the mirror image of the ideal layout for a woman. This seems quite illogical to me - people are for the most part symmetrical (at least on the macroscopic scale) so I'd have thought that left-handedness verses right-handedness would make far more difference than gender. No explanation was given for this, and I was too shy to challenge the expert.

It might be an interesting experiment, though. First, find a pair of houses or apartments in the same neighbourhood which are each others' mirror images, fit and furnish them identically but oppositely (even down to switching the positions of the hot and cold taps, and putting the hinges on the opposite sides of the doors). Then, populate each with one half of a pair of identical twins of the same gender and opposite handedness. Let them live there for a year and then quiz them in great detail about which elements of their domiciles work and which are annoying. I think they would find the same things annoying, but according to this Feng Shui expert, the differences would be quite pronounced.

Leave a Reply