Those of us who wear glasses, we are totally lost if we lose or break our glasses. But all is not lost, we can still see, according to a TV programme MinutePhysics.

In the episode, Henry Reich explains an easy trick to correct our own vision, no lenses or surgery required!

“Make a tiny, tiny hole using your fingers, look through it, and the world will become clear again,” he says. “This works, no matter how blurry your vision is. Take off your glasses and give it a try.”

I tried it and it worked like magic!

Let’s see why this works. Light needs to travel from a source, bounce off on object and then travel into our eye to be projected onto our retina, where it will form an image of that object. If it weren’t for the lens built into our eyes, light bouncing off an object would split and hit the retina in different places, resulting in us seeing nothing but a smeared-out mess.

If an object is too near or far from our lens, its light will be naturally spread across our retina, causing the image we perceive to be blurred. When the muscles in our eyes contract, the lens don’t work properly, glasses, contacts and surgery help us to focus on near and far objects.

The reason the MinutePhysics pinhole trick works is that when light travels through a small space, it gets focused from any distance. Because it’s such a small opening, light can only travel through in one place, which means we no longer have the problem of light hitting the retina in multiple places. The key is blocking, rather than focusing, light.

So make a pinhole with your hand, and see through it!

Published in Dawn, Young World, January 6th, 2018