Invisible Man. Most famous works

WITH invisible people we mostly know each other works of art. There you can put on a magic hat or take a special drug - and no one will notice you. The question of why this happened is skillfully masked by a series of adventures of an invisible hero.

Meanwhile, invisible people have been mentioned in incident reports and police reports for several centuries. And this is already a reason for a serious conversation with an attempt to answer: how, contrary to the laws of physics, does this happen?

Not everyone likes long hair

It is known that multiple encounters with invisible people occurred in China in 1876. In the city of Nanjing, some invisible attackers cut off men's braids, traditional for this country. The attacks took place on the street in front of dozens of witnesses. After some time, similar cases were reported in Shanghai.

Traditional Chinese men's braids

Invisible women who cut other people's hair operated on the streets of Chinese cities for almost three years, but they were never caught. Scientists, having studied ancient documents, came to the conclusion that something similar had already happened in the Celestial Empire: invisible evil spirits hair cutting is described as a real phenomenon in ancient Chinese manuscripts.

IN late XIX centuries, similar cases were observed in other countries. In 1873, in the city of Menomonee (Wisconsin, USA), a girl standing on the street suddenly felt someone cutting her hair - and at the same time it disappeared without a trace. Neither she nor the witnesses to the incident were able to prevent the hooliganism.

In 1890, attacks by an invisible man were recorded in Japan, who inflicted wounds on people in the neck. It is unlikely that the attacker’s goal was murder, because the depth of the cuts was only a few millimeters.

Several newspapers wrote about these incidents. European countries. The reaction of the readers was unambiguous: in Asia and America, people are simply going crazy, and they are imagining all sorts of devilish things.

But a little later, in 1922, a similar thing happened in England. On the streets, some invisible hands were cutting off the hair of young girls. The police were unable to do anything other than draw up reports.

On April 23, 1922, the People newspaper published a report from Charing Cross Hospital in London. A patient was admitted there with a knife wound on his neck. According to him, he passed one of the intersections of Coventry Street - and suddenly, in the complete absence of people around, he was stabbed with a knife and fell.

A few hours later, another man was admitted to the same hospital, wounded with a knife in the neck, and some time later, a third, who received the same wound at the same intersection and under similar circumstances.

Village of Hidden People

At the end of the 20th century, reports appeared in the Western press about an entire village of invisible people living in Indonesia. They are called "orang bunyan", translated from Malay as "hidden people".

From what the reporters managed to find out: the invisible people live deep in the forest and have supernatural power. Sometimes they kidnap children. Apparently, their time flows differently: there were cases when children who had been stolen earlier and had already grown up returned to their homes, but none of their relatives remained alive, because several years of life for the abducted turned into almost a century for those who remained.

The Malays marked the border with the place where the Orang Bunyan live with large boulders. Those who ask them for help come here. They bring food and other gifts and turn to the invisible people to solve their problems. Sometimes this happens, causing faith in invisible people to become stronger.

It is believed that one of them can live in a house with ordinary people and create complete chaos there. We must respect him and try to appease him in every possible way.

Many Indonesian hotels leave a free room for such an invisible person. If there is nowhere else to stay, a newcomer can be accommodated there, but they will be asked to follow special rules.

Upon entering the room, you should turn on all the lights and pull back the curtains so that the “orang bunyan” gets acquainted with the guest in the maximum possible light. If a guest suddenly feels cold, he must leave the room; his visit does not suit the invisible person.

If this does not happen, then the “orang bunyan” agrees to let the neighbor live. But before going to bed, just in case, the guest should turn one shoe over with the sole up: eastern tradition, this position of the shoes symbolizes the energies of yin and yang, which protect against evil forces.

Europeans who visited Indonesia provide numerous evidence of the existence of “orang bunyan”: they heard the sounds of drums heard in empty clearings, saw the appearance and disappearance of food or dishes, observed the movement of transparent silhouettes in the rain, etc.

Help from parallel world

How can we explain the existence of invisible people? Popular point of view: they live next to us, in a parallel world.

One of those who shares and actively promotes this version is researcher paranormal phenomena Magnus Skarfedinsson from Reykjavik (Iceland). His collection contains more than 700 testimonies of those who in one way or another came into contact with invisible people.

It’s interesting that invisible people in Iceland are also called “hidden people.” According to most accounts, they come to the rescue when someone is in trouble (for example, they are ready to pull a fallen person out of a gorge or lead a lost person out of the forest). When communicating with ordinary people, they can become visible - and then they look the same as us, although their clothes are more reminiscent of medieval outfits.

Skarfedinsson claims that the invisible people come from their parallel world only when their help is needed. Somehow it doesn’t fit with the cases of hair cutting in China or England, does it?

Other forms of matter?

Another point of view: the existence of invisible people is due to the fact that life in the Universe can have the most different shapes- and also consist of such rarefied matter that human eye unable to see her.

This opinion was shared by the famous “father of astronautics” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in the book “Dreams of the Earth and the Sky” noted that we cannot brush aside the fact that the facts indicate the presence of some invisible intelligent beings in our lives.

In the 1960s, academician Vlail Kaznacheev, who deals with issues of biophysics, suggested that in addition to the protein-nucleic acid form that is familiar to us, life on the planet can be represented by some kind of energy structures that are invisible to the human eye.

And again, it is unclear: why should representatives of a different form of life remind themselves of themselves with openly hooligan antics?

Why don't they see them?

Couldn’t the phenomenon of invisible people unite phenomena of different orders? That is, the invisible people who stabbed with a knife are completely different invisible people than the “orang bunyan”, as well as those who come to the rescue from a parallel world or consist of other forms of matter?

In 1998, an interesting story was published in American newspapers. Several Minneapolis teenagers were stealing from supermarkets. One day they were detained and handed over to the police. At the station they were interrogated - all except a girl named Jennis.

No one paid attention to her, as if she did not exist. The girl was surprised at first, and then left the station premises without hindrance. Later, she talked about this topic with her accomplices - and they also confirmed that Jennis had turned invisible for some time.

This incident became Starting point for the research of psychotherapist Donna Higbee. She placed an advertisement in several popular magazines asking for reports of incidents when a common person becomes invisible for a while. The responses were not long in coming.

A woman from Ventura (California) spoke about a situation where she was at the post office and tried to attract attention - but neither the employees nor other visitors saw or heard her. Another woman living in Roanoke, Texas, reported that she had attacks of invisibility in a restaurant and at the airport. Another Texan from Fort Worth wrote about how he unexpectedly disappeared to those around him in a movie theater.

Letters with similar stories came not only from the United States, but also from other countries. Donna Higbee notes that after personal meetings with these people, she is completely confident in their adequacy.

In 2001, during the inauguration ceremony of George W. Bush, a short man suddenly appeared next to him. The man did not have an invitation - but security officials say they did not see him until he shook hands with the president.

The Russian press also wrote about such a case-when a student at St. Petersburg University was robbed of all his money, and he was forced to travel by train without a ticket for a month. During this time, the controllers and fellow travelers did not seem to notice him. But a month later, when the money issue was settled, the “invisibility” disappeared.

These examples speak of a phenomenon of a completely different order - that a person can somehow block his visual perception other people. It is not invisible in itself, but somehow makes one not see itself. This is something akin to hypnosis - but it can happen unexpectedly for the invisible person himself.

This point of view is confirmed by the research of psychotherapist V. Isakov, under whose leadership experiments were carried out in laboratory conditions, as a result of which hypnotized people did not see anyone present.

This version fully explains the aggressive behavior of some invisible people who, using their acquired supernatural powers, could enjoy their power by frightening other people.

Victor SVETLANIN

In the novel "The Invisible Man" English writer Wells strives to convince his readers that the possibility of becoming invisible is entirely possible. His hero (the author of the novel introduces him to us as “the most brilliant physicist the world has ever seen”) discovered a way to make the human body invisible. This is how he explains to a doctor he knows the reasons for his discovery:

“Visibility depends on the action of visible bodies on light. You know that bodies either absorb light, or reflect it, or refract it. If a body does not absorb, reflect or refract light, it cannot be visible in itself. You see, for example, an opaque red box because the paint absorbs some of the light and reflects (scatters) the remaining rays. If the box did not absorb any part of the light, but reflected all of it, it would appear to be a shiny white box, silver. The diamond box would absorb little light, its overall surface would also reflect it a little; only in places, on the edges, the light would be reflected and refracted, giving us the brilliant appearance of sparkling reflections - something like a light skeleton. A glass box would be less shiny and not as clearly visible as a diamond box, because there would be fewer reflections and fewer refractions. If you put a piece of ordinary white glass in water and, even more so, if you put it in some liquid denser than water, it will disappear almost completely, because the light falling through the water onto the glass is refracted and reflected very weakly. The glass becomes as invisible as a stream of carbon dioxide or hydrogen in the air, for the same reason.

“Yes,” said Kemp (the doctor), “all this is very simple and is known to every schoolchild these days.”

- And here’s another fact, also known to every schoolchild, If a piece of glass is crushed and turned into powder, it becomes much more visible in the air - it becomes an opaque white powder. This happens because pounding multiplies the facets of the glass, which produce reflection and refraction. The plate has only two sides, and in the powder the light is reflected and refracted by each grain through which it passes, and very little of it penetrates through the powder. But if you put white crushed glass in water, it immediately disappears. Crushed glass and water have approximately the same refractive index, so as light passes from one to the other, it bends and reflects very little.

By putting glass in some liquid with almost the same refractive index, you make it invisible: any transparent thing becomes invisible if it is placed in a medium with the same refractive index. It is enough to think a little to be convinced that glass can be made invisible in the air: it must be arranged this way. So that its refractive index is equal to the refractive index of air, because then, moving from glass to air, light will neither be reflected nor refracted at all.

“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. - But a person is not like glass.

- No, it is more transparent.

- And this is a natural scientist speaking! Have you really forgotten physics completely in ten years? Paper, for example, consists of transparent fibers; it is white and impenetrable in the same way that glass powder is white and impenetrable. Oil it up white paper, fill the spaces between the fibers with oil so that refraction and reflection occur only on the surfaces - and the paper will become transparent, like glass. And not only paper, but also linen fibers, wool fibers, wood fibers, our bones, muscles, hair, nails and nerves! In a word, the entire composition of a person, except for the red substance in his blood and the dark pigment of his hair, everything consists of transparent, colorless tissue; that’s how little makes us visible to each other!”

These considerations can be confirmed by the fact that non-haired albino animals (whose fabrics do not contain dyes) are largely transparent. A zoologist who found a specimen of a white albino frog in Detskoe Selo in the summer of 1934 describes it as follows: “Thin skin and muscle tissues are translucent: the insides and skeleton are visible... The contraction of the heart and intestines is very clearly visible through the abdominal wall of the albino frog.”

Gorey in Wells's novel invented a way to make the tissues of the human body and even its dyes (pigments) transparent. He successfully applied his discovery to own body. The experiment was a brilliant success - the inventor became completely invisible. ABOUT future fate We will now recognize this invisible man.

We can achieve complete invisibility of a completely transparent object if we surround it with walls that scatter light strictly evenly. The eye that looks inside through a small side hole will then receive from all points of the object just as much light as if the object did not exist at all: no highlights or shadows will reveal its presence.
This is how such an experience might be framed. A funnel, half a meter in diameter, made of white cardboard installed as shown in the figure, at some distance from the 25-candle light bulb.

Invisible glass rod.
A glass rod is inserted from below, strictly vertically if possible. The slightest deviation from the vertical position makes the stick appear dark along the axis and light at the edges, or, conversely, light along the axis and dark at the edges. Both lighting patterns transform into one another with a slight change in the position of the stick. After a series of tests, it is possible to achieve completely uniform illumination of the stick, and then for the eye looking through a narrow (no wider than 1 cm) side hole, it disappears completely. In this experimental setting, complete invisibility is achieved. glass object, despite the fact that its refractive power is very different from that of air.
Another technique for making, for example, a piece of cut glass invisible is to place it in a box coated on the inside with luminous paint.

This novel describes the fate of an English medical scientist and later physicist Griffin, who invented a device that makes a person invisible (and, at the same time, a drug that bleaches blood). True, for complete invisibility a person had to be an albino, which Griffin was. Griffin did not want to make his discovery public ahead of time in order to create a greater sensation later. However, circumstances were such that due to financial difficulties he could not continue his work. He had the idea to “disappear” and start completely new life as an invisible person.

Fearing police persecution following a complaint from the owner of the house in which he lived, dissatisfied with his incomprehensible and suspicious activities, and a possible subsequent investigation, Griffin sent notes about his experiments by post restante, went into an invisible state, destroyed the apparatus and set fire to the house where he lived, to completely cover my tracks. At first he felt like “a sighted man in a city of the blind.” However, it soon turned out that his position was not so enviable. Without an apparatus, he could not make his food and clothing invisible, so he had to walk naked and suffer from the cold, and take food very rarely and secretly from other people. He also could not announce himself, because he was afraid that he would lose his freedom and would be shown in a cage.

All this forced him to find himself in the position of an outcast, avoiding human society. Griffin settled in the village of Aiping and began to work on regaining his usual “visible” appearance (this is where the story begins; that is, all of the above becomes known to the reader only closer to the end). However, after some time he ran out of money and had to hide again.

Griffin turned for support to a scientist named Kemp, with whom he once studied. Griffin proposed starting a campaign of terror and intimidation of people, the ultimate goal of which would be to seize power. But Kemp refused to cooperate with the invisible man and called the police. Then the invisible man sentenced Kemp to death and began to hunt for him, but ultimately this led to the death of Griffin. He was captured and killed by an angry mob. After death, his body became visible again. The secret of invisibility was never restored, since Griffin destroyed his car, and his notes were stolen by the tramp Thomas Marvel, whom Griffin used as an assistant (Marvel naively hoped to unravel the secret on his own and become invisible).

Griffin became one of the most famous images « evil genius"in world literature.

In the novel The Invisible Man, the English writer Wells seeks to convince his readers that the possibility of becoming invisible is quite feasible. His hero (the author of the novel introduces him to us as “the most brilliant physicist the world has ever seen”) discovered a way to make the human body invisible. This is how he explains to a doctor he knows the reasons for his discovery:

“Visibility depends on the action of visible bodies on light. You know that bodies either absorb light, or reflect it, or refract it. If a body does not absorb, reflect or refract light, it cannot be visible in itself. You see, for example, an opaque red box because the paint absorbs some of the light and reflects (scatters) the remaining rays. If the box did not absorb any part of the light, but reflected all of it, it would appear to be a shiny white box, silver. The diamond box would absorb little light, its overall surface would also reflect it a little; only in places, on the edges, the light would be reflected and refracted, giving us the brilliant appearance of sparkling reflections - something like a light skeleton. A glass box would be less shiny and not as clearly visible as a diamond box, because there would be fewer reflections and fewer refractions. If you put a piece of ordinary white glass in water, and, moreover, if you put it in some liquid denser than water, it will disappear almost completely, because the light falling through the water onto the glass is refracted and reflected very weakly. The glass becomes as invisible as a stream of carbon dioxide or hydrogen in the air, for the same reason.

“Yes,” said Kemp (the doctor), “all this is very simple and is known to every schoolchild these days.”

Figure 109. Invisible glass rod.

“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. - But a person is not like glass.

- No, it is more transparent.

- And this is a natural scientist speaking! Have you really forgotten physics completely in ten years? Paper, for example, consists of transparent fibers; it is white and impenetrable in the same way that glass powder is white and impenetrable. Oil white paper, fill the spaces between the fibers with oil so that refraction and reflection occur only on the surfaces - and the paper will become transparent, like glass. And not only paper, but also linen fibers, wool fibers, wood fibers, our bones, muscles, hair, nails and nerves! In a word, the entire composition of a person, except for the red substance in his blood and the dark pigment of his hair, everything consists of transparent, colorless tissue; that’s how little makes us visible to each other!”

These considerations can be confirmed by the fact that non-haired albino animals (whose tissues do not contain dyes) are largely transparent. A zoologist who found a specimen of a white albino frog in Detskoye Selo in the summer of 1934 describes it as follows: “Thin skin and muscle tissues are translucent: the insides and skeleton are visible... The contraction of the heart and intestines is very clearly visible through the abdominal wall of the albino frog.”

Gorey in Wells's novel invented a way to make the tissues of the human body and even its dyes (pigments) transparent. He successfully applied his discovery to his own body. The experiment was a brilliant success - the inventor became completely invisible. We will now learn about the further fate of this invisible man.

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High with stratospheric balloons
In previous articles, we mentally traveled into the bowels of the earth, and the formula for the dependence of air pressure on depth helped us. Let us now dare to rise up and, using that

Why is it colder when there is wind?
Everyone knows, of course, that in calm weather frost is much easier to bear than in windy weather. But not everyone clearly understands the reason for this phenomenon. Greater cold is felt when there is wind

Hot breath of the desert
“This means that the wind should bring coolness even on a hot day,” the reader may say after reading the previous article. - Why, then, do travelers talk about hot breath?

Is the veil warm?
Here is another problem from the physics of everyday life. Women claim that the veil provides warmth and that without it, the face feels cold. When looking at the light fabric of the veil, often with rather large cells, men

Cooling jugs
If you have never seen such jugs, then you have probably heard or read about them. These vessels made of unfired clay have the curious feature that the water poured into them

Glacier without ice
The design of a cooling cabinet for storing food, a kind of “glacier” without ice, is based on evaporative cooling. The design of such a cooler is quite simple: it is a box made of

How much heat can we tolerate?
Man is much more resilient to heat than is usually thought: he is able to endure southern countries the temperature is noticeably higher than what we in the temperate zone consider barely

Thermometer or barometer?
There is a well-known joke about a naive man who did not dare to take a bath for the following unusual reason:

What is lamp glass used for?
Few people know about what long haul the lamp glass passed before it reached its modern look. For a long series of millennia, people have used flames for lighting, not

Why doesn't the flame go out on its own?
If you think carefully about the combustion process, the question involuntarily arises: why doesn’t the flame go out by itself? After all, combustion products are carbon dioxide and water vapor - substances

Breakfast in a weightless kitchen
“My friends, we haven’t had breakfast yet,” Michel Ardant announced to his companions on the interplanetary journey. - From the fact that we lost our weight in a cannon shell, it does not follow at all

Why does water extinguish fire?
They don’t always know how to answer such a simple question correctly, and the reader, we hope, will not complain about us if we briefly explain what this effect of water on water actually consists of.

How do you extinguish fire with fire?
You have probably heard that the best, and sometimes the only, means of fighting a forest or steppe fire is to set fire to the forest or steppe from the opposite side. A new flame is coming

Is it possible to boil water with boiling water?
Take a small bottle (jar or vial), pour water into it and place it in a saucepan standing on the fire with clean water so that the bottle does not touch the bottom of your pan; to you in

Can you boil water with snow?
“If boiling water is unsuitable for this purpose, then what can we say about snow!” - another reader will answer. Don’t rush to answer, but rather do the experiment with at least the same glass bottle,

Is boiling water always hot?
The gallant orderly Ben-Zouf, whom the reader, no doubt, met through Jules Verne’s novel Hector Servadac, was firmly convinced that boiling water is always and everywhere equally hot.

Hot Ice
Now we were talking about cool boiling water. There are even more amazing thing: hot Ice. We are accustomed to thinking that water in a solid state cannot exist at temperatures above 0°

Cold from coal
Producing not heat from coal, but, on the contrary, cold is not something unrealistic: it is carried out every day in so-called “dry ice” factories. Coal is burned here in

MAGNETISM. ELECTRICITY.
"Loving Stone"

Compass problem
We are accustomed to thinking that the compass needle always faces one end to the north and the other to the south. Therefore it will seem completely absurd to us next question: where on the globe is magnesium

Lines of magnetic forces
A curious picture depicts Fig. 91, reproduced from a photograph: from a hand placed on the poles of an electromagnet, bunches of “large nails stick out upward, like coarse hair. Herself

How is steel magnetized?
To answer this question, which is often asked by readers, it is necessary to explain, first of all, how a magnet differs from a non-magnetic bar of steel. Each atom of iron contained in

Gigantic electromagnets
In metallurgical plants you can see electromagnetic lifting cranes carrying huge loads. Such cranes provide invaluable services when lifting and moving iron masses.

Magnetic tricks
Magicians sometimes use the power of electromagnets; It’s easy to imagine what spectacular tricks they perform with the help of this invisible force. Dari, author famous book"Electricity"

Magnet in agriculture
Even more curious is the useful service that a magnet provides in agriculture, helping the farmer clean the seeds of cultivated plants from weed seeds. Weeds have fleecy

Magnetic flying machine
At the beginning of this book I referred to an entertaining essay French writer Cyrano de Bergerac "History of the States on the Moon and the Sun." It, by the way, describes a curious le

Electromagnetic transport
IN railway, which was proposed to be arranged by prof. B.P. Weinberg, the cars will be completely weightless; their weight is destroyed by electromagnetic attraction. You won't be surprised, therefore, if

The battle of the Martians with the earth multipliers.
Naturalist ancient Rome Pliny conveys a story that was widespread in his time about a magnetic rock somewhere in India, near the seashore, which attracted with extraordinary force

Clocks and magnetism
When reading the previous passage, the question naturally arises: is it possible to protect yourself from the action of magnetic forces, to hide from them behind some barrier impenetrable to them?

Magnetic "perpetual" motion machine
In the history of attempts to invent a “perpetual” motion machine, the magnet played no role. last role. Unsuccessful inventors tried in different ways to use a magnet to create a mechanism,

Museum task
In the practice of museum work, the need often arises to read ancient scrolls that are so dilapidated that they break and tear with the most careful attempt to separate one layer of the manuscript from

Another imaginary perpetual motion machine
Gained great popularity among seekers of perpetual motion machines in Lately the idea of connecting a dynamo to an electric motor. Every year I receive almost half a dozen of these

Almost perpetual motion machine
For a mathematician, the expression “almost eternal” does not present anything tempting. Motion can be either eternal or non-eternal; “almost eternal” means, in essence, non-eternal. But

Birds on wires
Everyone knows how dangerous it is for a person to touch the electrical wires of a tram or high-voltage network when they are live. Such a touch is fatal to humans and

By the light of lightning
Have you ever seen a busy city street during a thunderstorm with brief flashes of lightning? You, of course, noticed one thing strange feature: street, just now

How much does lightning cost?
In that distant era, when lightning was attributed to the “gods,” such a question would have sounded blasphemous. But these days, when electrical energy has become a commodity that is measured and

Thunderstorm shower in the room
It is very easy to make a small fountain at home from a rubber tube, one end of which is immersed in a bucket placed on a raised surface, or placed on a water tap. Output hole

Five times shot
One of the curiosities of photographic art are photographs in which the photographed person is depicted in five different rotations. In Fig. 105, made from a similar photograph, can be

Solar Motors and Heaters
The idea of using energy is very tempting sun rays to heat the engine boiler. Let's do a simple calculation. The energy received every minute from the Sun by each square

Dream of an invisibility hat
Hoary antiquity has left us a legend about a wonderful hat that makes everyone who puts it on invisible. Pushkin, who revived the legends of deep antiquity in “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” gave a cla

The Power of the Unseen
The author of the novel “The Invisible Man” with extraordinary wit and consistency proves that a person, having become transparent and invisible, thereby acquires

Transparent drugs
Are the physical arguments that form the basis of this science fiction novel correct? Undoubtedly. Any transparent object in a transparent medium becomes invisible even when

Can the invisible see?
If Wells had asked himself this question before writing the novel, the amazing story of The Invisible Woman would never have been written... Indeed, at this point the whole and

Protective coloring
But there is another way to solve the “invisibility cap” problem. It consists of painting objects with an appropriate color, making them invisible to the eye. I constantly resort to him

Protective color
People have adopted from inventive nature this useful art of making their body invisible, blending into the surrounding background. The motley colors of the brilliant uniforms of former times, etc.

Human eye underwater
Imagine that you are given the opportunity to remain under water for as long as you like and that you keep your eyes open. Could you see there? It would seem that since the water is clear

How do divers see?
Many will probably ask: how can divers working in their spacesuits see anything under water if our eyes in water almost do not refract light rays? After all, the diver

Glass lentils underwater
Have you tried this simple experiment: immerse a biconvex (“magnifying”) glass in water and examine the immersed objects through it? Try it, you will be amazed

Inexperienced bathers
Inexperienced bathers are often exposed to great danger only because they forget about one curious consequence of the law of refraction of light: they do not know that refraction is like

Invisible pin
Stick a pin into a flat cork circle and place it pin side down on the surface of the water in the bowl. If the cork is not too wide, then no matter how you tilt your head, you will not be able to

The world from under water
Many people do not even suspect how extraordinary the world would seem if we began to look at it from under water: it must appear to the observer changed and distorted almost literally.

Colors in the deep waters
American biologist Bieb vividly describes the change in light shades under water. “We plunged into the water in the bathysphere, and the sudden transition from the golden-yellow world to the green

The blind spot of our eye
If they tell you that there is an area in your field of vision that you cannot see at all, although it is right in front of you, you, of course, will not believe it. Is it possible that we

How big does the Moon appear to us?
By the way, about the apparent size of the Moon. If you ask your friends what size the Moon seems to them, you will get a wide variety of answers. Most would say that the Moon

Apparent sizes of luminaries
If, while maintaining the angular dimensions, we wanted to depict the constellation Ursa Major on paper, we would get the figure shown in Fig. 126. Looking at her from a better distance

Why does a microscope magnify?
"Because it changes the course of the rays in a certain way described in physics textbooks,” is what you most often hear in response to this question. But this answer states

Visual self-deceptions
We often talk about “optical deception”, “hearing deception”, but these expressions are incorrect. There are no deceptions of feelings. The philosopher Kant aptly said about this: “Feelings do not deceive us, not according to

Illusion useful for tailors
If you want to apply the visual illusion just described to larger figures that cannot be immediately captured by the eye, then your expectations will not be justified. Everybody knows,

That more?
Which ellipse in Fig. 131 is larger: the lower one or the inner upper one? It's hard to get rid of the thought that the bottom one is larger than the top one. Meanwhile, both are equal, and only the presence of the outer, bordering

The power of imagination
Most optical illusions, as already indicated, depend on the fact that we not only look, but also unconsciously reason. “We look not with our eyes, but with our brains,” say physicists

Another visual illusion
We are not able to explain all visual illusions. Often it is impossible to guess what kind of conclusions are made unconsciously in our brain and determine this or that visual deception

What is this?
When looking at Fig. 142 you can hardly immediately guess what it depicts, “Just a black mesh, nothing more,” you say. But place the book vertically on the table, step back 3 steps -

Extraordinary wheels
Have you ever watched the spokes of the wheels of a fast-moving cart or car through the cracks of a fence or, better yet, on a movie screen? You probably noticed a strange phenomenon;

Microscope of time" in technology
The first book of Entertaining Physics describes a “time magnifying glass” based on the use of a movie camera. Here we will talk about another way to achieve a similar effect, based on

Nipkow disk
A remarkable technical application of optical illusion was the so-called “Nipkow disk,” which was used in the first television installations. In Fig. 146 you see a solid circle,

Why is the hare sideways?
Man is one of the few creatures whose eyes are adapted to simultaneously viewing some object: the field of vision of the right eye only slightly differs from the right eye.

Why are all cats gray in the dark?
A physicist would say: “in the dark all cats are black,” because in the absence of lighting no objects are visible at all. But the saying does not mean complete darkness, but darkness in everyday life.

Sound and radio waves
Sound travels about a million times slower than light; and since the speed of radio waves coincides with the speed of propagation of light vibrations, sound is a million times slower

Sound and bullet
When the passengers of the Jules Verne projectile flew to the moon, they were puzzled by the fact that they did not hear the sound of the colossal cannon firing from its mouth. It could be otherwise

Imaginary explosion
The competition in speed between a flying body and the sound it produces sometimes forces us to unwittingly make erroneous conclusions, sometimes completely inconsistent with the true picture of the phenomenon.

Slowest conversation
If you think, however, that the true speed of sound in air - a third of a kilometer per second - is always fast enough, then change your mind now. Imagine what me

The fastest way
There was, however, a time when even this method of transmitting news would have been considered very fast. A hundred years ago no one dreamed of an electric telegraph and telephone, and the transmission of news

Drum telegraph
The transmission of news through sound signals is still common among the primitive inhabitants of Africa, Central America and Polynesia. Primitive tribes used for this

Sound clouds and air echoes
Sound can be reflected not only from solid obstacles, but also from such delicate formations as clouds. Moreover, even completely transparent air can, under certain conditions, reflect

Silent sounds
There are people who do not hear such sharp sounds as cricket singing or squeaking bat. These people are not deaf; – their hearing organs are in good working order, and yet they do not hear very high pitches

Ultrasounds at the service of technology
The physics and technology of our days have the means to create “silent sounds” of a much higher frequency than those that we have just talked about: the number of vibrations can reach in these “sounds”

Voices of Lilliputians and Gulliver
In the Soviet film “The New Gulliver,” the Lilliputians speak in high voices, corresponding to the small size of their larynx, and the giant, Petya, speaks in a low voice. During the shooting they spoke for lil

For whom is the daily newspaper published twice a day?
Now we will tackle a task that, at first glance, has nothing to do with sound or physics. Nevertheless, I ask you to pay attention to it: it will help you understand more easily.

Locomotive whistle problem
If you have a developed musical ear, then you probably noticed how the pitch (not the volume, but the tone, pitch) of a locomotive whistle changes when an oncoming train rushes past

Doppler phenomenon
The phenomenon that we have just described was discovered by the physicist Doppler and has forever remained associated with the name of this scientist. It is observed not only for sound, but also for light phenomena

The story of one fine
When Doppler first (in 1842) came to the idea that the mutual approach or distance of the observer and the source of sound or light should be accompanied by a change in the length of the perceived sounds

At the speed of sound
What would you hear if you moved away from a playing orchestra at the speed of sound? A man traveling from Leningrad on a postal train sees newsboys at all stations alone and