Human Eye Can Detect Even Individual Photons, The Smallest Unit Of Light: Study

The human eye is capable of detecting the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light, in the dark, researchers said. In a study first published in the journal Nature Communications Tuesday, scientists found that the human eye can sense individual particles, seemingly concluding the quest to test the limits of human vision. "If you imagine this, it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment," Alipasha Vaziri, lead researcher from the Rockefeller University in New York, reportedly said. "The most amazing thing is that it's not like seeing light. It's almost a feeling, at the threshold of imagination," he told the Nature. The experiment was conducted with three subjects who sat in a dark room for nearly 40 minutes and were then told to look into an optical system.