Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
I am long overdue for a puzzle, so here is a tough one (I think). This is a perspective I remember from when I was a young boy. Another young boy recently discovered it, and shared a similar wonder, so I tried to capture the image…
oh, it looks like a bellows… what from… c´est la question.. the bellows of a pipe? Of an old camera? A bellows itself to blow a fire? The neck of a dummy clown poping from a gift box? a folding door? a stretched fan?
Can be a paper lamp too… =)
ps: the first time in my life I use the word ‘bellows’… is it always used in plural?
pss: many of my guessings are considering looking at the picture vertically, that is…
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Jurvey, that meant that I am a light year from the answer, right? +)
Aaaaaaaand, can it have something to do with power converters ???
Is it mirrors positioned in a manner to reflect to infinity and the green hue is from the mirror glass itself?
Wow! That surprised me. I think your "light" clue in answering The Alieness and the description of how it brought a sense of wonder to you and the young boy you referred to got me to thinking along those lines.
Thanks for posting it Steve. I’ve been hoping you’d do another one. Don’t stop now… show us more!
Kev, the fastest guesser of the Milky West!
Now I see, could the ‘gap’ just in the center of the patern be the breaking point making the infinitereflexionproject.com?
So, if there are no mirrors (and no spoon) what is it involved in the effect?
A dummy clown bellow neck maybe? 😉
zenera: yum. I like green cup cakes!
Alieness: yes, the gap is the center…. there are mirrors (physics), but there are no mirrors (like what you’d get if you asked to buy a mirror in a store).
Again, every word of Rocketeer’s first answer is correct:
"Is it mirrors positioned in a manner to reflect to infinity and the green hue is from the mirror glass itself"
yet a wonderful ambiguity remains….
According to the EXIF data with the photo, it was taken at 5.5mm, so you’re close.
Not coasters… How about a stack of plate glass shelves, maybe from a display case, turned vertically?
Belated Bingo Rocketeer, the Puzzle-crunching champion. It is one big vertical sheet of plate glass.
This is the image you see looking into the side of a ½”-thick slab of glass. When I was a child, we had a glass table that gave this perspective to curious kids at crawling height… The glass in this photo is a glass wall, free-floating on two sides (with some wood grain from the opposite side visible in the reflections).
You have to get your eye, or camera, right up to the edge to see this. The glass is clear, but from the side it looks green (the accumulation of a slight green tint in a very “thick” direction). That’s what first catches your eye. Why is the glass so green? When you move in, suddenly a whole new world unfolds….
I think the repeating lines come from total internal reflection (the same principle that allows a fiber of glass to be a near perfect conduit for light). The two parallel flat surfaces are like perfect mirrors for light trapped inside the glass (much of which came in from the opposite side), so there is a “hall of mirrors” effect.
A stack of CD’s will also produce this image and the bright lines are produced by light that has passed through the layers by multiple reflections.
My CD version is can be seen below: 
It uses the same principles, but creates a similiar image in a slightly different way.
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