Broken Pencils and Moving Rulers: After an unpublished book by Mitchell Feigenbaum

TL;DR

This paper explores how viewing images through cylindrical mirrors or water affects perception, showing that head orientation influences visual interpretation due to the eye's lens properties.

Contribution

It provides an explanation and illustration of how head tilt alters perception when viewing images through cylindrical or water reflections, highlighting a novel visual phenomenon.

Findings

Perception depends on head orientation when viewing through cylindrical mirrors or water.

The eye's lens properties cause different rays to reach the retina, affecting interpretation.

Head tilt changes perceived image orientation and shape.

Abstract

Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered an intriguing property of viewing images through cylindrical mirrors or looking into water. Because the eye is a lens with an opening of about 5mm, many different rays of reflected images reach the eye, and need to be interpreted by the visual system. This has the surprising effect that what one perceives depends on the orientation of the head, whether it is tilted or not. I explain and illustrate this phenomenon on the example of a human eye looking at a ruler immersed in water.