I was cleaning the smudges off of my eyeglasses again ( and again.. and again..), and I was mumbling about how the heck does that stuff get on my glasses all day long, when DG stepped in and explained it to me.
You see, when you look at something, he says, your eyes send out Eye Beams to the thing you are looking at, like this.
Eye Goo comes out along with the Eye Beams, and it gets caught in the glasses… because glasses are transparent to Eye Beams… but the Eye Goo gets stuck in them.
Um, OK, then.
It sounded a bit fishy to me, so I looked it up. It turns out that this is an ancient Greek theory of eyesight. Really! It is called the Emission Theory. Look it up on the Wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)
Here is a scary quote from the Wiki…. (scroll to the bottom)
“Winer et al. (2002) have found evidence that as many as 50% of adults believe in emission theory. ”
What? No, wait. It gets better. I followed the link to the study and I saw this.
“The authors reviewed research about a profound misconception that is present among college students, namely, the belief that the process of vision includes emanations from the eyes”
College students?
We are so doomed.
