I Forgot How Sunglasses Work

And it caused an existential panic

I was laying on the couch in my apartment, reading a book I really wanted to finish that afternoon. Something I read made me think of an awesome concept for a photo. (If you didn’t know, I caught the film photography bug last fall and I don’t plan on getting over it any time soon.) So I put down my book and starting thinking through if the concept is even possible with real life physics and how I would go about trying to test it.

I quickly fell deep into the trenches of thinking about the physics of light.

Reflection. Refraction. Diffusion. Absorption. Transmission.

Lenses. Filters. Mirrors. Prisms

In the process of ideating a solution, I started to think about sunglasses.

This was the dialogue in my mind…

I wear sunglasses almost everyday, yet I don’t think I have ever thought about how they work before.

Obviously they make things darker. The lenses are filters that block out some of the light.

They are transparent. You can still see through them.

Some are “polarized” but I don’t know what that means.

Glasses can affect how you see color, they don’t have to be sunglasses to do that. Blue light glasses help you eyes when you’re staring at screens a whole lot. My regular glasses are technically blue light glasses, but does that mean I see everything differently? Well, I already do because I am colorblind, so my experience is a bit of a lost cause.

But sunglasses, they make things darker, but do they change the colors? Wait. Sunglasses block light. Light is color. So sunglasses block color? Do sunglasses make everything greyscale? How do I not know if sunglasses make everything black and white? I wear sunglasses everyday, how do I not know what they do? CAN I SEE COLORS WHILE WEARING SUNGLASSES?

“HOW DO SUNGLASSES WORK?” I yelled to my roommate in the kitchen. He laughed. “No seriously, I need some sunglasses to figure this out”.

Before you might question it for yourself— Yes, you still see color while wearing sunglasses.

I should have thought about traffic lights, you can clearly see that the red light, yellow light, and green light, are in fact very different colors even when you wear sunglasses.

That whole 2 minute sequence, though silly, was quite shaking.

It is absolutely wild that we can live and interact with things our whole life and not actually know how it works.

Unless we’re experts in a specific field, we go about life totally unaware of how the fundamentals of life operate.

How do sunglasses work? How does gravity work? How do sound waves work? How do I blink or breathe? How do I know when to blink or breathe? How does heat “cook” food? How do liquified dinosaur remains make cars run?

I could ask a million questions and have a million more.

I love learning, but the amount I would need to learn to understand even 1% is absolutely unimaginable. It’s impossible.

The wildest part of all of these mental gymnastics is that there are things that I know that I don’t know. Like sunglasses. Like walking. Like breathing. My eyes know how to see through sunglasses and process the information found in the light. My feet, legs, and body know how to coordinate to get me where I want to go. My brain knows how to get my lungs to so I have the oxygen I need.

That. Is. WILD.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t know how sunglasses work because my brain has got me covered.

One mild, two-minute panic turned introspective moment later and I’m back to the autopilot of trusting that my body knows the things it needs to know to survive. It’s better that way.