United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
New Zealand
IrelandDerek Muller revisits Plato's visual fire on minutephysics
A 2018 pilot made with MinuteEarth gets a public airing, tracing vision from outward beams to incoming light.
minutephysics
Story of Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.
Plato Got Vision Totally Wrong
Next story: minutephysics explains why you're glowing, even when you can't see it
Things we can learn from the video
Press to jump
- 1:42Ancient extramission theories treated sight as something traveling outward from the eyes.
- 5:33Ibn al-Haytham's experiments support the opposite model: light enters the eye.
- 8:00An incoming-light model leaves puzzles about image inversion and why a wide pupil doesn't produce blur.
- 9:07Kepler identifies the eye's lens as the focusing mechanism and accepts the retina's inverted image.
- 11:35Optical illusions demonstrate that perception involves the brain interpreting sensory input.
- 13:00Muller asks whether today's brain-as-computer model might itself give way to another scientific paradigm.
Henry Reich has opened the door to a film that previously sat behind a paywall. His introduction to "Plato Got Vision Totally Wrong" explains that this week's sole upload began as a 2018 pilot, made with MinuteEarth and Veritasium's Derek Muller.
Muller presents a history of sight with a wonderfully strange starting point: the idea that eyes send something outward to meet the world. Plato's "visual fire" gives way to geometric rays, anatomical investigations and, eventually, Ibn al-Haytham's experiments showing that light enters the eye. Kepler supplies another crucial piece: a lens that focuses an upside-down image on the retina. Understanding the optics, the film makes clear, isn't the same as understanding perception.
The upload has reached roughly 317,000 views and is minutephysics' busiest video right now. Viewers are making connections to computer graphics, where rays can be traced outward from a virtual camera. Others ask why an inverted retinal image should mean we experience an inverted world at all. Several also discuss an earlier title about sensing someone's gaze, saying they expected that question to be addressed.
The channel's subscriber count held steady just below six million this week, while its current daily views are less than half their usual level. Nearby in science, Be Smart's daily viewing is above its norm, while Real Engineering is having a slower spell.
Behind the vision film, "What if We Can't Detect Dark Matter?" carries the most momentum. Its tour of gravitational evidence and possible explanations has reached roughly 733,000 views, giving minutephysics another question about how we know what we know, this time on a cosmic scale.
Published on Trari
A professional in this field? Want to write about Science & learning on Trari? Tell us ›
Where next?
What viewers say
So we basically thought that reality was a ray tracing engine?
@themcprofessorSee it on YouTubeOne thing I've never understood about the "upside-down image" thing: If everything you saw was upside-down and backwards, how would you know? That's the direction it's always been.
@timothymcleanSee it on YouTube3:54 It's funny that for computer graphics, especially ray tracing, this is actually how it works. Rays are cast from an origin point through a grid of squares in front of it (representing the pixels on screen), towards a distant object and (possibly) bouncing off of those objects towards a light source.
@rikschaafSee it on YouTube
4 more comments
But can you sense that someone senses you?
@user-op8fg3ny3jSee it on YouTubeThis was an interesting video, but the title made me think this would be about something else.
@Samantha_SaysSee it on YouTubeI always found it weird how people say "The eyes' lenses flip the image on the retina, therefore we should perceive it flipped too". Like... why would that necessarily be the case? Just because a receptor cell is at the top of the retina doesn't mean that the brain **has** to interpret a signal from that as coming from above.
@ihrbekommtmeinenrichtigennamenSee it on YouTube1:15 this exact melody was logged in my brain for years, even after I forgot about this pilot
@MarcTelangSee it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
Want to know when somebody answers you?
Is this your channel?For the channel's owners and team: a ready picture and text for your audience
Share the story with your audience. Everything is ready:
For an Instagram story or a WhatsApp status
For a community post or your channel's description
The videos drawing views on minutephysics right now
- Channel
- minutephysics
- Subscribers
- 5,990,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 682,038
- Videos published this week
- 1
- Video published
- November 12, 2026
- Video views so far
- 316,983
- Views on its first day
- 243,037
The numbers
Here is minutephysics' week in views and subscribers.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which astronomer explains the eye's focusing lens in the film?
The film credits Kepler with explaining how the eye's lens focuses light onto the retina.