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Evolution, the master of optical science!

By Frank Kuo


This post originally appeared on CLEO BLOG by Frank Kuo and is reproduced with permission from its author.

Do not get me wrong; evolution is an expert of all physical science. But it intimately links nature to optical science without doubt — from cyanobacteria that have been converting solar energy to chemical energy for 3 billion years to human beings who rely on vision for surviving.

Neuroscience indicates that about 25%~ 50% of the brainpower and as many as 30 different areas of the brain are devoted to vision processing. This simply means that each human being is hard wired as an optical scientist, although we hardly recognize this. Over the past millions of years, evolution has perfected our imaging device in a subtle way. Recently, a report on Biomedical Optics Express shows for the first time the eyes’ imaging sensors — cones and rods by using adaptive optics to minimize the aberration caused by the eye structure. As shown in the figure 1, cones, the round structures, create red, green, and blue perception of colors. There are about 6-7 millions of them, concentrated at the center of the retina — forvea. A friendly and easy to digest article about this topic can be found here.

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Posted: 30 July 2011 by Frank Kuo | with 0 comments

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