• Question: If something is completely transparent - can you see it?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Yes definitely. However, to manage this you’ll need to be in possession of a gun that fires ink, or any kind of gunge that will stick to the completely transparent item. In the unlikely event that you are unable to locate such a gun (perhaps because the gun itself is transparent) the best approach might be to find a physicist (this is not my area of expertise). I suspect that some transparent items are only transparent at certain wavelengths of light, or (depending on what they are made of) they may reflect images. Perhaps we could design an app that would do this???

    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      You probably can’t see it easily – but there’s a chance you might be able to detect it with your eyes. A higher chance if you have other kinds of sensory equipment.
      Can you see the air in front of you?

    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Interesting question! So transparency is when light can pass through something without being disrupted so if you can disrupt the light then you could perhaps see the transparent object. This is why you can see the edge of transparent objects because the light direction is changed at these points. Transparency is pretty cool and can even be found occurring in nature, for example ‘Glass frogs’ are partially transparent and in fact you can see into their bodies and even see there hearts beating.

    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Yes, because it can still affect the path of light. So, a high quality lens can be seen not because it stops light but because it bends it. An air bubble in clear glass bends light differently and so we can see it. However, there is another case where we can see the effect of a completely transparent object. Imagine that we had a ball of perfectly clear glass as big as a planet. It would distort space and time because of its mass. This would cause light to take a different path even if it did not enter or reflect from the transparent object

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