Vision is awe inspiring. The wondrous nature of this sensory process becomes clear when we consider just a few of its features. In the terminology of today's technology, the human visual system has a set of stereoscopic foreoptics that are instantly and automatically focusable to a few centimeters and are fully corrected for geometric aberrations, a servo‐controlled two‐axis scanning mechanism, a millisecond framing rate, sensitivity to brightnesses varying by a factor of 100 billion, the ability to detect a single photon, nearly 100&percent; quantum efficiency and a spatial as well as temporal image processor that could not be matched by the fastest supercomputer.