system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is a mirror both silver AND able to reflect everything at the same time?

I don't understand. Is it actually not silver and there's some crazy cultural mind trick convincing me to think it's silver when there's actually no silver there in the first place?
gpt
I believe your question is asking how can a mirror be colored silver, and at the same time show a reflection.

The way vision works is that light hits an object, bounces off, and then hits our eyes. When this happens some of the colors of light get absorbed, and what is left gets reflected. A green leaf will absorb every color except for green, which then bounces off for us to see.

A mirror is a very very smoothly polished surface, so that light bouncing off does not go in random directions. Instead all of the light rays bounce in the same way, so the light we see is almost exactly the same as what originally bounced off the object. A mirror also does not absorb very much light, so most of it bounces off unchanged.

If the silver part of a mirror was roughed up it would start to appear more "silver" because the light would be bouncing around randomly instead of all reflecting the same way.

TLDR Mirrors don't absorb colors of light, so their color is whatever hits them.