Maybe biology, maybe physics. I’m not sure. Either way, I really can’t wrap my head around this
When I look in a mirror without my glasses on, everything in the ‘distance’ in the mirror is still blurry, but how can this be? All the light reaching my eye from that mirror is coming from the same place. The light can’t be out of focus before it reaches the mirror, so how come it can be when reflecting from the flat plane to my eye?
*Edit: I do understand how an image is produced in a mirror and how we perceive depth in a reflected image, but the fact is that the light is still reflecting off of a flat plane at a uniform distance – I can’t understand how that reflection can possibly have **actual** depth that can affect my shortsightedness*
In: Biology
You don’t actually see the world in three dimensions. You see it in two dimensions, because the light beams don’t communicate any information about the distance they travelled to reach your eye. Instead, we interpret depth, and kind of patch it back into the image the brain sees, based on things like like the angle of the incoming light – differences in the angle light must travel at to reach each of your eyes allows the brain to make a decent guess at how far away the object in question is. The more displaced an image is between the eyes, the closer it is. This is because when you look at a close object, light that bounces off it in a wide range of angles will all still reach your eye, whereas when you look at something further away, only a smaller range of angles of reflection can reach your eye.
Shortsightedness is basically an over-bending of light rays towards the center of the eye by the lens, which causes the focal point to occur a bit infront of your retina, instead of directly on it. This affects things travelling at quite straight angles towards you (ie, things in the distance), but doesn’t affect things where you can also see light that’s coming it at wider angles, because the wide angle light’s focal point is on the retina (it would normally be behind the retina).
Mirrors reflect light at the same angle as the incoming light, [but in the other direction](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fvoer.edu.vn%2Ffile%2F55384&f=1&nofb=1). This makes it appear as if the image has depth, because the angles of light that bounce off the mirror towards your eye are travelling at the same relative angle as the original light – only the more straight angles of an object far away will bounce off the mirror in the right way to reach your eyes, so it looks far away in the mirror too because it’s only the angle that the brain can use to determine distance.
That light is also travelling at the same angles that your eye bends to a focal point infront of the retina, so it creates an image in your eye in the same way light from an actual far away object does.
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