Mon, August 21, 2006
Fleeting Curiosity Dept.—3:21 PM
If I take my glasses off and look through them the wrong way, the effect is the same as when I'm wearing them: things become a little clearer.
So why is it that if I look at my eyes in a mirror, they don't look fuzzy? I'm looking through the spectacles twice now, so shouldn't that have the effect of doubling my prescription, and making things look wrong?
Joe Mulder — Mon, 8/21/06 5:50pm
I don't understand the question.
Bee Boy — Mon, 8/21/06 9:19pm
Me neither! It really was a fleeting thing. I think my point was, if someone with a prescription twice as strong as mine gave me their glasses, everything would look fuzzy for me. So if I'm looking through my glasses twice (effectively doubling my prescription? maybe?) shouldn't it look fuzzy? Obviously not. There's something I'm missing.
Also missing: an "Are you sure you want to publish this?" step on the onebee back-end.
Joe Mulder — Tue, 8/22/06 6:35pm
I think I understand. You're not looking through them twice. You're looking through them once, into a flat mirror that is reflecting an image of you looking through them.
Bee Boy — Wed, 8/23/06 12:25am
But a mirror isn't a flat image, is it? It's a reflection of light waves/particles; you can look into the mirror and focus on near or distant objects (unlike you could on a flat image). So isn't light passing from my face through the lens, off the mirror, through the lens again, and into my eye?
(Not that this is a big deal; I just figured I'd try to clarify my reasoning.)
"LilSis" — Wed, 8/23/06 11:44am
Every object you see is a result of light waves bouncing off that object and passing through your lens to your eye (and through the lens of your eye ultimately to your brain). It makes no difference to your eye that these particular light waves originated at your eye before they were reflected off the mirror. As far as your eye is concerned the light waves originated at the mirror.