Guy Baruch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > visible and IR-A pass thru the lens like a hot knife thru butter, > they can then cause retinal (neuronal) damage. This is AFAIK > irreperable blindness. As in blind for life.
My point about UV was that UV could hurt your eye at low intensities, just because the photons are both high-energy and high cross-section to do damage. Bright visible light cannot hurt the eye, up to really high power at least. You can look directly at the sun or at a nuclear explosion, and as long as you are protected from UV (by glass, for instance) you should be OK. There is nothing special about laser light, except coherence which should not matter. Well, you can also have a very thin laser beam which, while low power overall, will possess very high energy density, which matters. IR can fry your retina or your eyeball as a whole, of course, at high enough intensity. I seriously doubt though that a CD-RW would have a powerful enough laser. As I said, I don't know what the actual parameters are. > AFAIK cd-drives are red wavelength, but their power is small. However, > I wouldn't bet my eyes on it. Oh, neither would I. ;-) > 1) glasses are no reliable protection against visible-light laser. No. I thought it was a very useful property for glasses, too. ;-) > 2) glasses are reflective. If a hazardous laser bounces of from them > it can hurt someone else . Actually, modern glasses are not reflective. Modern lenses come with anti-reflective coating that reduces reflection very significantly, at least for visible light. ;-) -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================== First binary search algorithm - J. Mauchly, 1946 First correct binary search algorithm - D.H.Lehmer, 1960 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
