The Chicago Tribune (2/3, Goering) reports that "eyeglasses using [a] simple, self-adjusting technology are now poised to revolutionize the way the world's poor -- and quite possibly the rest of us -- see, potentially coming to the aid of billions who struggle to squint enough to farm, study, drive or hold down any job." Joshua Silver, an Oxford University atomic physicist, "was fiddling around one day with a cheap water-filled lens he'd built...when he noticed" that "by adding or removing water he could not only change the power of the lens...but he also could use it to very accurately correct his own nearsightedness when he looked through it." Silver "hopes to find funding to distribute a billion pairs to people around the world too poor to afford glasses or living in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where the ratio of opticians to residents is purportedly one to one million." Thus far, he "has...turned out about 30,000 pairs of the cheap glasses."
Interesting concept. Of course, new lenses would be necessary in the case of scratches, broken glasses, and if a person needed bifocals. I had read about this once before--the lenses can only correct for near or far-sightedness, not astigmatism.
No comments:
Post a Comment