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You CAN see without your glasses

MinutePhysics

According to Minute Physics, all you need to do is make a pinhole with your
hand, which will help you focus the light coming into your retina. Sure, it won't
give you 20/20 vision, but it's a good start if you've left your glasses at home.
There are plenty of different options for a person to correct their less-than-
perfect vision these days. From glasses and contacts to corrective laser
surgery, we've pretty much thought of everything. But if you're in a pinch, say,
your contact lenses fell off the counter and disappeared, or your glasses have
been smashed by a bloodthirsty gang of shipwrecked schoolboys, Minute
Physics has got you covered.
In the episode above, Henry Reich runs us through a quick and easy trick to
correct your own vision, no lenses or surgery required. "Make a tiny, tiny hole
using your fingers, look through it, and the world will be come clear again," he
says. "This works, no matter how blurry your vision is. Take off your glasses
and give it a try."
But how is such a simple fix possible? To understand it, we have to think back
to how seeing actually works. Put very simply, for you to perceive something,
light needs to travel from a source, bounce off on object, and then travel into
your eye to be projected onto your retina, where it will form an image of that
object. If it weren't for the lens built into our eyes, light bouncing off an object
would split and hit the retina in all different places, resulting in you seeing
nothing but a smeared-out mess.
This is why when you see something in front of you, everything in the
background and foreground will be slightly blurry - the lens in our eye can only
focus light coming from one distance away, says Henry. If an object is too
near or far from your lens, its light will be naturally spread across your retina,
causing the image you perceive to be blurred. And that's where the muscles in
our eyes that can contract the lens come into play, and when those don't work
properly, glasses, contacts, and surgery help us to focus on near and far
objects.
The reason the Minute Physics pinhole trick works is because when light
travels through a small space, it's able to be focussed from any distance.
Because it's such a small opening, light can only travel through in one place,
which means we no longer have the problem of light hitting the retina in
multiple places. The key is blocking, rather than focussing, light.