Backwards retina: can see one photon! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 22, 2016, 19:48 (2828 days ago) @ David Turell

A recent study shows the human eye can see one photon:-http://phys.org/news/2016-07-humans-smallest.html#jCp-"Research by a team from Rockefeller University and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria has shown that humans can detect the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light. Previous studies had established that human subjects acclimated to the dark were capable only of reporting flashes of five to seven photons.-***-"If you imagine this, it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment," says Vaziri. "The response that the photon generates survives all the way to the level of our awareness despite the ubiquitous background noise. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way."-"In addition to recording the ability of the human eye to register a single photon, the researchers found that the probability of doing so was enhanced when a second photon was flashed a few seconds earlier, as if one photon "primes" the system to register the next.-***-"To arrive at their findings, Vaziri and his collaborators combined the light source with, an unprecedented psychophysics protocol called two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) in which subjects are repeatedly asked to choose between two time intervals, one of which contains a single photon while the other one is a blank. The gathered data from more than 30,000 trials demonstrated that humans can indeed detect a single photon incident on their eye with a probability significantly above chance.-"'What we want to know next is how does a biological system achieve such sensitivity? How does it achieve this in the presence of noise? Is the mechanism unique to vision or could it tell us something more general on how other systems could have evolved to detect weak signals in the presence of noise?" says Vaziri."-Comment: Vaziri notes this is an amazing achievement for a biologic system, done warm and wet, not the ultra cold that man made detectors would require. Yep, the design is upside down and backward and therefore a poor design by God, as atheists want you to believe.