At the center of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity are questions of perspective.
For example, what would a man look like to another man traveling at the speed
of light and vice-versa? In that spirit, and to put a biological spin on it, what
would Einstein look like to a bee?According to Andrew Giger, a neuroscientist interested in bee vision, Einstein would look like this.
Giger generated this image with a software package called B-EYE which he developed while at the Center for Visual Sciences at Australian National University. The application uses a grayscale image and produces an image like the one at left through a three-step process described here.
Like most insects, bees have compound eyes: arrays of hundreds of single eyes (ommatidia), each with its own lens and each looking in a different direction. The ommatidia are arranged in a hexagonal array. This produces the hexagonal array of patches seen in the Einstein image - each patch corresponds to one ommatidium.
By clicking on this link you can actually use the B-EYE software to view a collection of images from differing distances and angles.
