PHYSICS PROJECT

TO STUDY THE OPTICAL LENS OF A HUMAN EYE

Eyes are organs that detect light, and convert it to electro-chemical impulses in neurons. The simplest photoreceptors in conscious vision connect light to movement. In higher organisms the eye is a complex optical system which collects light from the surrounding environment; regulates its intensity through a diaphragm; focuses it through an adjustable assembly of lenses to form an image; converts this image into a set of electrical signals; and transmits these signals to the brain, through complex neural pathways that connect the eye, via the optic nerve, to the visual cortex and other areas of the brain. Eyes with resolving power have come in ten fundamentally different …show more content…
This is based upon the shared anatomical and genetic features of all eyes; that is, all modern eyes, varied as they are, have their origins in a proto-eye believed to have evolved some 540 million years ago.[11][12][13] The majority of the advancements in early eyes are believed to have taken only a few million years to develop, since the first predator to gain true imaging would have touched off an "arms race".[14] Prey animals and competing predators alike would be at a distinct disadvantage without such capabilities and would be less likely to survive and reproduce. Hence multiple eye types and subtypes developed in parallel.
Eyes in various animals show adaption to their requirements. For example, birds of prey have much greater visual acuity than humans, and some can see ultraviolet light. The different forms of eye in, for example, vertebrates and mollusks are often cited as examples of parallel evolution, despite their distant common ancestry.
The very earliest "eyes", called eyespots, were simple patches of photoreceptor protein in unicellular animals. In multicellular beings, multicellular eyespots evolved, physically similar to the receptor patches for taste and smell. These eyespots could only sense ambient brightness: they could distinguish light and dark,