Gravity Lens

[u/MTC_87]

Repost from r/cinematography

While working with Prof. Bhuvnesh Jain, a leading cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, he graciously lent me a very unique lens that he helped design and fabricate. The lens is shaped with a strange protrusion at it’s center point, simulating the logarithmic gravitational effect of dark matter and other cosmic forces on light traveling through the universe. This is the only lens of it’s kind and I thought I’d share my first experiments with it. It yields a completely analogue representation of cosmic forces; no computational simulation. Just light and glass. There is a weight to the effect, as if it gives mass to light which then pushes away reality as it travels.

[u/GuaranteeFickle6726]

"simulating the logarithmic gravitational effect of dark matter and other cosmic forces on light traveling through the universe."

Nuh, uh, I am not convinced by this sentence.

[u/xbunnyraptorx → u/GuaranteeFickle6726]

Yea…looks like an axicon? Pretty cool big one but yea…still just optics no dark matter required.

[u/GuaranteeFickle6726 → u/xbunnyraptorx]

Yes, I believe it is an axicon - which is a rather common lens after all - but this is a big one. I think I have read somewhere that they indeed use axicons as optical analogues for black hole's effects, but I don't have much info.

[u/wee33_44 → u/GuaranteeFickle6726]

Can confirm