Frost Glass

These are not glasses, these are empty frames.

The 21st century now allows us to build bigger glasses much bigger glasses.

They called it the Eyeglass.

Upon removal of the contact lens, users experienced clear, natural vision without the need for daytime contact lenses or glasses.

Through the lens the image was inverted.

Imagine being able to make perfect lenses.

We take a microscope slide.

Now you've finished the lens, you literally pop it out.

The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here.

And there's many of them, all over its entire body.

Coin sized mirrors on the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacements units have since served as quot contact lenses quot for HST.

On the left, this is a brittle star it's covered with lenses that the people at Lucent Technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever.

So, imagine a lens the size of a football field.

And underneath the microscope there were splinters of glass.

Folded lens, you divide up the panels, you add flexures.

Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record.

If it's elliptical, you can make an astigmatic lens.

That's my camera lens. The first one the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago.

The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe.

There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide.

It's one of the most distortion free lenses we know of.

If it's circular, you make a spherical lens.

That's next year's Yves Klein, you know, eyeglasses shape.

Oh, before I even turn that on, one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class this is through the lens, and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light.

Sometimes they send you pictures of them using the microscope.

They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens, and we would see ourselves, on TV, pasting.

And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very, very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got.

You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time.

And then, here's a beautiful composite of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

So, to cut a long story short, I went home, went underneath the microscope, and I crushed up a piece of glass, crushed it up.

The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up, 100 meter diameter lens.

In other words, no mirrors, no lasers, no prisms, no nonsense, just a tiny device, and he built this device. And this device uses electron tunneling.

And I still think the Time magazine picture will be of the binoculars, you know, leaving out the what the hell.

I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus actually the clouds of Venus.

But they get glasses in the frames of their choice, and that's very important because I think glasses, in addition to helping people see, is also a fashion statement, and they're willing to pay for it.

All these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope, actually in the lab at Kew Laboratories.

And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes.

The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time.

I am very, very happy to be amidst some of the most the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they're reflecting on my glasses.

Josh Silver delivers his brilliantly simple solution for correcting vision at the lowest cost possible adjustable, liquid filled lenses. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020.

You set the fracture, you drew the blood, you spun the blood, looked at it under the microscope, you plated the culture, you injected the antiserum.

It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live.

The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images.

There was a time when we failed to negotiate the intra ocular lens prices to be at affordable levels, so we set up a manufacturing unit.