I Do Not Believe That There Are Three Classes Of Cones!

July 16th, 2005  |  No Comments »

(or any such thing as “Classes of Cones”!)

Was there ever a situation in the history of science where arbitrarily normalizing a curve (the purported “blue” or “S” cone curve) led to such a fictitious, wrongheaded, belief that was held for so long - and is still quoted over and over in textbooks and taught to students daily!! Please study the link above to see how desperately the desire has been over the years to see that these three curves exist.

Or, how about the preposterous “quantal catch” notion used to explain the stacking of thylakoid disks that comprise the extraordinary length of receptor outer segments! There was never a scintilla of experimental evidence for this proposal and yet it is taught as dogma! Completely disregarded is the incorrect (i.e., orthogonal to “photon direction”) dichroic orientation of the rhodopsin/retinal complex contained within the thyakoid disks of receptors

“The most important result is the absence of dichroism when the incident light is parallel to the axis of either a rod or cone whereas dichroism is pronounced in rods and cones illuminated perpendicularly to their axis: absorption of light with the electric field perpendicular to the long axis is approximately 6 times that of the light with the electric field parallel to the long axis…”
- Zhevandrov, Physics-Uspekhi, 38,(10),1995)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 9:20 am and is filed under Further Essays, Rods and Cones . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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