Re: [Phys-l] inversion goggles

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Let us do a little thought experiment.  If we received a TV signal from
Alpha Centauri and it was similar to the old fashioned b&w signals we used
to produce we would naturally decode it in a similar fashion to our TVs.
But we find that things look strange, so with investigation we find that it
is up side down.  Would we say that this is because the TV camera was upside
down or they used poor lenses?  No, we would assume that the scanning was
done from R to L, down to up.  Or actually the opposite on the inverted
image.  The picture at the back of a camera is upside down but the scanning
is opposite to what our TVs do, so we get a right side up image.

Our eyes are like that.  We learn to interpret what we see from the signals
that we receive, and later associate it with up, down...  There is some hard
wiring built in, but the baby learns to control the eyes and to interpret
what they see.  The puzzle is only one of our imagination stemming from our
expectations.

Incidentally about the research done by the school of optometry, how can
they tell the difference between a sharp jittery image and a fuzzy one?  One
would suppose they could examine the focusing of the bay's eyes to see how
sharp it is.  But could they tell if there are problems with nerves being
crossed?

The work of Piaget was some of the very early work which showed how babies
learn and manipulate the environment to figure out things.  Our students
have generally fogotten how to do this!  Babies are natural
experimentalists.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> > P.S. I'm still trying to figure out how our brain flips 
> inverted images on
> > our retina so we see the world as upright. My eye doctor 
> once told me that
> > this is initially not true for newborns -- that they 
> literally see the
> > world inverted! Wow!