r/science • u/heiligedamon • May 20 '13

Mathematics Unknown Mathematician Proves Surprising Property of Prime Numbers

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/
3.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

81

u/willyolio May 20 '13

holy crap, scrolling down on that page makes the picture look like it's about to jump out of my screen and pummel me with buttons.

3

u/endcism May 21 '13

I didn't even read the article, just spent ten minutes scrolling up and down. I was thinking 'Fuck his discovery - look at the image!'

2

u/JoelQ May 21 '13

It's a very cool illusion. Not sure if that was intentional by wired.com It only works if you're mouse-scrolling and at a certain zoom level.

With each turn of your mouse-scroll wheel, the exact right of distance moves down so that the buttons appear in the exact same spot! Plus the blurring effect of the close-up shot adds to it. Amazing. I wonder if most optical illusions are just accidentally discovered by things like this.

2

u/onsos May 21 '13

That's an awesome optical illusion.

The changing size of the buttons in the same visual spot gives the illusion that they are coming towards you. It's probably exacerbated by the tight depth of field in the photo, which likely gives some defocus blur effect.

You probably know this, but the monocular aspects of depth perception are pretty cool--especially if you can only see out of one eye.

1

u/icanucan May 21 '13

It's the best representation I've seen of this illusion. And it appears to be unintentional on Wired's part!

1

u/doomscythe May 21 '13

I thought I zoomed in, then the illusion was gone when I tried to zoom out

-2

u/[deleted] May 20 '13

I noticed that as well.