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Problems That Go The Other Way
Let's say you want to see inside someone using only your eyes. You might think you can't do it because light doesn't go through people. But actually if you use a bright enough light, some light does go through. You can see this yourself if you go into a dark room and cover a bright light with your hand. You will see some light coming through your hand. But you still can't see what the inside of your hand looks like!
The real problem is that the light going through your hand doesn't go in a straight line. It hits lots of bits of your hand on the way through and changes directions many times. This means seeing the inside of your hand is not easy. But maybe if we think very hard, we can figure out a way to use this kind of crazy direction changing light to find out what the inside looks like. We could write down numbers that tell us how much light comes out in different places, and see if we can use those numbers to figure out what is inside. This is one of the kinds of things I think about for my job.
Sometimes people who think about this sort of thing can find ways to help doctors look inside people who are sick. This doesn't always happen, but it means these things can turn out to be very important as well as interesting!
I used this to make sure that I only used the ten hundred most often used words to write this.
The idea of doing this comes from here.