Broken pencils and moving rulers: After an unpublished book by Mitchell Feigenbaum

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 5 mm, 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.