An impossible trident with backgrounds, to enhance the illusionRoger Hayward's Undecidable Monument
An impossible trident,[1] also known as an impossible fork,[2]blivet,[3]poiuyt, or devil's tuning fork,[4] is a drawing of an impossible object (undecipherable figure), a kind of an optical illusion. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.
In 1964, D.H. Schuster reported that he noticed an ambiguous figure of a new kind in the advertising section of an aviation journal. He dubbed it a "three-stick clevis". He described the novelty as follows: "Unlike other ambiguous drawings, an actual shift in visual fixation is involved in its perception and resolution."[5] The word "poiuyt" appeared on the March 1965 cover[6] of Mad magazine bearing the four-eyed Alfred E. Neuman balancing the impossible fork on his finger with caption "Introducing 'The Mad Poiuyt' " (the last six letters on the top row of QWERTY typewriters, right to left). An anonymously contributed version described as a "hole location gauge" was printed in the June 1964 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, with the comment that "this outrageous piece of draftsmanship evidently escaped from the Finagle & Diddle Engineering Works" (although something else called a "hole location gauge" had already been patented in 1961[7]).
The term "blivet" for the impossible fork was popularized by Worm Runner's Digest magazine. In 1967 Harold Baldwin published there an article, "Building better blivets", in which he described the rules for the construction of drawings based on the impossible fork.[4][8] In December 1968 American optical designer and artist Roger Hayward wrote a humorous submission "Blivets: Research and Development" for The Worm Runner's Digest in which he presented various drawings based on the blivet.[9] He "explained" the term as follows: "The blivet was first discovered in 1892 in Pfulingen, Germany, by a cross-eyed dwarf named Erasmus Wolfgang Blivet."[10] He also published there a sequel, Blivets — the Makings.
Notes
↑ Andrew M. Colman, A Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN0199534063, p. 369
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps.
Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.
In visual perception, an optical illusion is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect. An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.
The Penrose triangle, also known as the Penrose tribar, the impossible tribar, or the impossible triangle, is a triangular impossible object, an optical illusion consisting of an object which can be depicted in a perspective drawing, but cannot exist as a solid object. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. Independently from Reutersvärd, the triangle was devised and popularized in the 1950s by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and his son, prominent Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, who described it as "impossibility in its purest form". It is featured prominently in the works of artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it.
An impossible object is a type of optical illusion that consists of a two-dimensional figure which is instantly and naturally understood as representing a projection of a three-dimensional object but cannot exist as a solid object. Impossible objects are of interest to psychologists, mathematicians and artists without falling entirely into any one discipline.
The Necker cube is an optical illusion that was first published as a Rhomboid in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. It is a simple wire-frame, two dimensional drawing of a cube with no visual cues as to its orientation, so it can be interpreted to have either the lower-left or the upper-right square as its front side.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions.
Axonometric projection is a type of orthographic projection used for creating a pictorial drawing of an object, where the object is rotated around one or more of its axes to reveal multiple sides.
Oscar Reutersvärd was a Swedish graphic artist, who in 1934 pioneered the art of 3D drawings that may initially appear feasible, yet cannot be physically constructed. He is sometimes described as "the father of the impossible figure", although there are much older examples, e.g. Hogarth's Satire on False Perspective.
Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception. Multistable perception is the occurrence of an image being able to provide multiple, although stable, perceptions.
A split pin, also known in the United States of America as a cotter pin or cotter key, is a metal fastener with two tines that are bent during installation, similar to a staple or rivet. Typically made of thick wire with a half-circular cross section, split pins come in multiple sizes and types.
Adelbert Ames Jr. was an American scientist who made contributions to physics, physiology, ophthalmology, psychology, and philosophy. He pioneered the study of physiological optics at Dartmouth College, serving as a research professor, then as director of research at the Dartmouth Eye Institute. He conducted important research into aspects of binocular vision, including cyclophoria and aniseikonia. Ames is perhaps best known for constructing illusions of visual perception, most notably the Ames room and the Ames window. He was a leading light in the Transactionalist School of psychology and also made contributions to social psychology.
Roger Newland Shepard was an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987). He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be comprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.
Cube with Magic Ribbons is a lithograph print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher first printed in 1957. It depicts two interlocking bands wrapped around the frame of a Necker cube. The bands have what Escher called small "nodules" or "buttonlike protuberances" that make use of the dome/crater illusion, an optical illusion characterized by shifting perception of depth from concave to convex depending on direction of light and shadow. Escher's interest in reversible perspectives, as seen in Cube with Magic Ribbons, can also be noted in an earlier work, Convex and Concave, first printed in 1955.
Roger Hayward was an American artist, architect, optical designer and astronomer. He is the inventor of an early Schmidt-Cassegrain camera that was patented in 1945. He was born on January 7, 1899, to mother, artist Ina Kittredge (Phelps) Hayward and local businessman and time piece hobbyist Robert Peter Hayward. He was the grandson of American landscape artist William Preston Phelps.
Integrative agnosia is a sub-disease of agnosia, meaning the lack of integrating perceptual wholes within knowledge. Integrative agnosia can be assessed by several experimental tests such as the Efron shape test, which determines the specificity of the disease being Integrative. This disease is often caused by brain trauma, producing medial ventral lesions to the extrastriate cortex. Affecting this region of the brain produces learning impairments: the inability to integrate parts such as spatial distances or producing visual images from short or long-term memory.
Geometrical-optical illusions are visual illusions, also optical illusions, in which the geometrical properties of what is seen differ from those of the corresponding objects in the visual field.
Schroeder stairs is an optical illusion which is a two-dimensional drawing which may be perceived either as a drawing of a staircase leading from left to right downwards or the same staircase only turned upside down, a classical example of perspective reversal in psychology of perception. It is named after the German natural scientist Heinrich G. F. Schröder, who published it in 1858.
The Shepard elephant, also known as L'egs-istential Quandary or the impossible elephant is an optical illusion, of the type impossible object, based on figure-ground confusion. As its creator Roger Shepard explains:
The elephant…belongs to a class of objects that are truly impossible in that the object itself cannot be globally segregated from the nonobject or background. Parts of the object become the background, and vice versa.
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