Your eyes may be more sensitive than you ever thought possible.
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Your eyes may be more sensitive than you ever thought possible.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers report that our warm, wet, multicellular eyes have evolved such a high level of sensitivity that they can, on occasion, detect a single photon aimed at the retina.
Even the most sophisticated man-made devices require a cool, temperature-controlled environment to achieve the same feat.
A single photon is the the smallest particle that light is made of, and it is extremely hard to see.
“It’s not like a dim flash of light or anything like that,” said Alipasha Vaziri, a quantum physicist at Rockefeller University in New York City and the senior author on the paper. “It’s more a feeling of seeing something rather than really seeing it.”
He described it, poetically, as being “at the threshold of imagination
“If you’ve ever looked at a faint star in the night sky and one second you see it but the next second you don’t — it’s kind of like that,” he said.