The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 1
Advancements in digital photography over the last several decades are truly amazing. Cameras of high quality and resolution now come standard in most smartphones. But there is an extremely versatile and innovative camera that is far superior to anything else on the market. This amazing device can capture both still images and video with unprecedented clarity and unrivaled color-depth. It has the capacity to automatically adjust its focus from infinity down to an inch in less than one second. This camera has a night-vision (greyscale) mode capable of detecting light from galaxies over two million lightyears away. But it can also be used during the day in conditions that are trillions of times brighter. It is highly portable, being less than one inch in size, and weighing only 28 grams.
The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 2
I recently had the opportunity to ride in one of the newer Tesla electric cars. The dashboard had a single touchscreen which displayed a perspective view of the vehicle itself – as if seen by a bird following the vehicle by 300 feet at about 100 feet in altitude. The screen also displayed grayscale model representations of all surrounding vehicles, along with the markings on the road, the speed limit, nearby traffic lights, and other driving information. In principle, you could drive the car without ever looking out the window by looking only at the screen. Apparently, cameras surrounding the vehicle feed images into a computer which constructs a 3D virtual model of its environment, which is then displayed on the screen. In other words, it does in a very limited way what your eyes and brain do with much higher fidelity every second of your conscious life.
The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 3 – Color
Our eyes and brain provide us with a nearly instantaneous mental picture of our immediate surroundings. This in itself is amazing and should prompt us to thank and worship our Creator. But the Lord has enhanced our visual experience with a wonderful feature: color. What exactly is color, and how do our eyes and brain process it?
The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 4 – Adaptation
The human eye is a marvel of design. All the parts work together to provide us with a vivid and colorful mental picture of our surroundings. As an astronomer, one aspect of human vision that I find particularly amazing and useful is the ability of the eye to adapt to extremely different lighting conditions. At night, the eye adjusts to be able to see stars that are 12 trillion times fainter than the sun. The way this mechanism works is ingenious and is merely one example of the cleverness of the Lord and of His grace toward us.
The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 5 – The Inverted Retina
Having examined some of the remarkable design features of the human eye, we here look at a feature that is sometimes claimed to support evolution: the inverted retina. Evolutionists claim this is a backward system that resulted from chance mutations. Far from being evidence of evolution, the inverted retina is extremely well planned. Furthermore, not all creatures have an inverted retina. Rather, each creature has a vision system that is well-designed for its environment.
The World’s Most Amazing Camera: Part 6 – Variations on a Theme
We previously explored the differences between the inverted retina of the human eye, and the verted retina of cephalopods. We found that each system was well-designed for the typical environment in which the creature lives. This prompts us to ask what other types of eyes the Lord has created. From a biblical creation perspective, we expect to find both similarities (due to having a common Creator who is a God of order) and differences (due to the Lord’s creativity) in the eyes of different varieties of animals. Furthermore, we would expect each type of eye to be well-suited for the organism in its environment, and irreducibly complex. And this is indeed exactly what we find.