The Man in the Spoon

Yesterday morning, long before coffee I might add, one of the kids
wanted to know why the man in the spoon was upside down. I thought
it was a pretty good question. A point of view that was reinforced
by the fact that Starr didn't know. So I had to explain to him why
the man in the spoon is upside down and in doing so I had an
epiphany.

Now....it's late so I will start slow.

If you look into the bowl of a spoon your reflection in the metal
appears to be upside down when in fact it's not. It's an illusion.
And now I will take on the challenge of attempting to explain why in
words and not in pictures. Call it a test of your inner vision.

The bowl of a spoon is concave (bent inward).
Meaning that light hitting its surface it reflected back at an angle.
Light hitting the top of the bowl follows the angle back out in a
downward direction while light hitting the base of the bowl (near
the handle) is reflected upwards.

That being the case, somewhere between the bowl and your eye the
light (that stuff that creates visual images) folds in on itself and
comes out of that anomaly of "no light" upside down.

Then of course the light reaches your eye which is convex (bent
outward). As the light passes through your Cornea (the outer surface
of your eye) the light is folded yet again before it hits your
Retina.

Now, when we "see" anything the light that is being bounced off of
whatever we are looking at is always flipped upside down by the
curve of your Cornea. So the image that appears on your Retina,
which is the stopping point of the light, is in fact, upside down.
But as this information passes through the Optic Nerve our brains
automatically reinterpret the image and turn it over again.
Therefore in an odd sort of way everything you see is only your
brains interpretation of the data it has collected from your eyes.
If your brain didn't do this automatic interpretation the entire
world would appear upside down.

The point being....what you see is not always what you see when you
see it.
And sometimes what we see appears to be upside down when in fact
it's not.

One really has to pay attention to what it is their looking at and
make sure that your seeing fact and not illusion...or at least your
interpretation of the facts, which again....is only an illusion.

Angel Snowden -2006