Seeing is believing

If you wear glasses, you know how cool they are. You wake up in the morning, and the numbers on your clock are blurry. But when you put those glasses on, wow. The image is perfectly clear.

Or maybe your parent or grandparent wears glasses. Before they can read your book report or see the score on your test, they have to reach for their glasses.

What do those magical lenses do to suddenly make a person be able to see? Dr. Robert Rhee is an eye doctor, or ophthalmologist, who treats kids. Eyeglasses, he said, work much like a big camera with an adjustable lens.

Look around you right now. Everything you see, you see because light is reflecting off it. If you were to turn off the lights and the room was completely dark, you wouldn’t be able to see anything.

That light enters the parts of the eye you can see – the black part called the pupil — and travels until it hits the back of the eye, called the retina.

"The retina is like the film on the camera," Dr. Rhee said.

Some people have eyes that are deeper or narrower than others. They need help focusing the light so that it creates a clear picture on the retina. That’s where eyeglasses come in. The glass itself helps to focus the light. Some people need a thicker glass, or lens, than others, depending on how much help they need focusing.

People put those eyeglasses on, and suddenly they can read without squinting, they are hitting more home runs and sinking more baskets. Eyeglasses make this all possible.