Stack Exchange
open access
CC BY-SA
How does light bend around my finger tip?
When I close one eye and put the tip of my finger near my open eye, it seems as if the light from the background image bends around my finger slightly, warping the image near the edges of my blurry fingertip. What causes this? Is it the heat from my finger that bends the light? Or the minuscule gravity that the mass in my finger exerts? (I don't think so.) Is this some kind of diffraction? To reproduce: put your finger about 5 cm from your open eye, look through the fuzzy edge of your finger and focus on something farther away. Move your finger gradually through your view and you'll see the background image shift as your finger moves. For all the people asking, I made another photo. This time the backdrop is a grid I have on my screen (due to a lack of grid paper). You see the grid deform ever so slightly near the top of my finger. Here's the setup: Note that these distances are arbitrary. It worked just as well with my finger closer to the camera, but this happens to be the situation that I measured. Here are some photos of the side of a 2 mm thick flat opaque plastic object, at different aperture sizes. Especially notice how the grid fails to line up in the bottom two photos.
Conceptio Open Archive
Analyze & explore related research in Conceptio
Connect this record directly into your research workflow or AI agent. Explore citations across open repositories, query full text, and export structured proof bundles.
This document is indexed with metadata only: full text is not available in the archive for this record. Open the official source ↗
Related documents
- 3-D Reconstruction of Fingertip Deformation during Contact Initiation#189361
- A Study to Compare a New Eye Drop Formulation With Refresh Contacts®#1089229
- Strong Gravitational Lensing with the James Webb Space Telescope#820456
- Optic Nerve Head Strain in Non-glaucoma Subjects#833750
- Kerr-Degenerate Shadows and Distinct Strong-Deflection Lensing in Rotating Hayward-like and Bardeen-like Geometries#1051751
Record · ID 787410
Retrieved via Conceptio: every document is proof-bundled with source, license, and retrieval metadata.
Retrieved via Conceptio: every document is proof-bundled with source, license, and retrieval metadata.
Bring this data into your agent: Connect via MCP or API · 20 free credits to start · no card required
Read the Docs → · View CLI source on GitHub · Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive
Read the Docs → · View CLI source on GitHub · Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive