Atomic physicist Joshua Silver estimates that at least 3.6 billion people in the world need vision correction and don't have it—a figure far greater than that put out by the World Health Organization. In this jovial audio lecture, Silver describes how he came to develop a new form of liquid-filled corrective lens that could be easily adjusted by the wearer to correct vision in an individualized fashion. He shares a bit of the journey of his ingenious, low-cost spectacles from laboratory to their trials and distribution in developing countries in Africa and Asia. He also discusses the formation of his research group at Oxford and his partnership with the U.K. Government's Department for International Development.
Professor Joshua D. Silver is a U.K. physicist whose discoveries have included a new way to change the curvature of lenses, with significant application for the low-cost manufacture of corrective lens. The leader of a group of researchers in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the University of Oxford, in 1996 he founded Adaptive Eyecare Limited, a U.K. company formed to research, develop, and apply adaptive ophthalmic lenses.
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