Images That Will Change Your Perception Of The World

The world's reality is that a simple change of perspective can turn everything you know on its head. These images will change your perception of the world.

September 25, 2023・

10 min read

We’d all like to think that the world is as straightforward as it seems, but the reality is that a simple change of perspective can turn everything you know on its head. Let's take a look at some images that will change your perception of the world.

Blood Vessels in a Human

From the outside, humans look like fairly simple creatures; but from another perspective, it’s mind-blowing how intricate the human body actually is. The image below shows a real human hand specimen that was injected with dyed plastic and left to set. When all the organic material was removed, it revealed the extent to which our blood vessels map through every inch of our being.

The smallest blood vessels inside you measure 5 micrometers; for comparison one human hair measures 17 micrometers. In fact, if you line up every blood vessel in the adult human body end to end, they’d measure almost 100,000 kilometers in length. That’s enough to circle the globe twice!

Cedar of Versailles

Trees are nature's diaries. From the outside, they seem like nothing more than a hardy, solid trunk. But if you were to cut one open, shave through the growth rings, and around the knots in the wood, you’d be stunned.

What you’d get is a sculpture of that very same tree in its first years as a sapling from decades or even centuries before. The art installation below by Giuseppe Penone was designed to reveal the work of life hidden within the wood, demonstrating the scale of this older tree’s younger self.

Double Full Circle Rainbow

Rainbows have been a meteorological fascination of humans for centuries, and despite knowing a lot about them, most of you are only ever seeing half the picture. That’s because rainbows aren’t arches, they’re circles!

Rainbows exist thanks to light refraction and reflection; when the light hits falling water droplets just right, it’s split into the colors seen at different wavelengths and is reflected back to earth at a very specific 42 degrees. From the ground, 42 degrees is just enough to show you the top of the rainbow, but from the air or at a vantage point, you can get the full 360-degree show!

Rainbow Floor

But rainbows don’t just belong in the sky. The following incredible phenomenon is known as rainbow sheen. It’s created when natural oils of decaying vegetation are released into stagnant waters, and form a thin, undisturbed layer on top.

Similar to a real rainbow, light reflects off the surface and appears different depending on the angle it enters your eye. The difference in thickness of parts of the oil film produces different refracted light rays, and these mix after being reflected to produce a spectrum of color across the forest floor.

The Mona Lisa is Small

For a world-famous painting that has its own dedicated room in the world's most renowned art museum, you’d expect Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to be a fairly large piece of art. But in reality, this masterpiece is more of a miniature.

At just 30 inches tall the Mona Lisa sits behind bulletproof, shatterproof glass in its very own room in the Louvre museum, where it looks more than a little out of proportion. With around 10 million visitors a year, which can vary between 30,000 to 50,000 per day, don’t expect a quiet trip where you can strike a pose during visiting hours!

RH Null

These are enhanced images of two red blood cells, and despite having the same structure you can see they differ significantly. The cell on the left is what would be considered a normal blood cell carrying Rhesus Antigens.

There are approximately 50 antigens that normally cannot be absent from a person’s blood as they cause an immune response, but a rare genetic mutation means the cell on the right has no Rhesus Antigens whatsoever.

This is a blood type known as RH Null, and less than 100 people on the planet are thought to carry it. Although like O-negative blood types they can donate to anyone, they can only receive from other Rh Null donors, of which there are only 9 active in the entire world.

Unexpected Giza Pyramids Views

If you’re traveling to Egypt hoping to see the famous pyramids in a sea of ancient desert, you might want to realign your expectations. Egypt is a modern country. And Giza, where you’d find those magnificent wonders of the world, is the thriving capital city.

Like most cities heavily reliant on tourism, there are plenty of modern amenities close by. Like Pizza Hut which you can actually enjoy the majestic view from, and maybe even add in a slice of your own history!

Sarcoma Cancer

There seems to be a preconceived notion of what cancer looks like; from lumps to tumors, they always seem to be pictured as an addition to part of the body. But in cases of bone cancer, there’s no choice but to view it differently when you see the bone exposed. The image below is the skull of a human who suffered from sarcoma cancer.

The action of the sarcoma cancer cells forms these abnormal calcium deposits on the bone's surface, resulting in a crystalline, feathery appearance of the affected areas. As devastating and painful as this looks, it's rare to be able to identify this from just a surface glance. Never gamble with your health, because you never know what lies beneath.

The Ship Shipping Ship

Here’s a brain teaser: how do you transport a transport ship if that transport ship isn’t water-ready? It’s not a question people tend to ask, since you just kind of assume they’re built all in one place. But what is actually used is a ship that ships ships!

The Blue Marlin is a semi-submersible heavy lift ship designed to transport more than 75,000 tonnes across the ocean at any one time. It doesn’t just carry ocean liners, it's used to help haul back damaged warships that can’t make it home and are too big to tow, and oil rigs built on land that are then attached to the pipeline. So technically, this is a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships!

Golf Ball Cross-Sections

The image below might look like the insides of planets or some abstract art. In fact, this is just a series of golf ball cross-sections. You may think all golf balls are made the same, but the interiors of each reveal different types and are meticulously made in a variety of ways to provide differing levels of performance. So even though they all look similar on the green, every golf ball is technically unique!

7x7x7 Rubik’s Cube

This may just seem like a slightly larger version of a traditional Rubik’s cube, but there’s more than meets the eye to this little puzzle box. There are more combinations on a 7x7x7 Rubik’s cube than there are atoms in the observable universe.

The actual number itself looks like this: 19 500 551 183 731 307 835 329 126 754 019 748 794 904 992 692 043 434 567 152 132 912 323 232 706 135 469 180 065 278 712 755 853 360 682 328 551 719 137 311 299 993 600 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 00

And the largest power it works to is called one duoquinquagintillion. So technically, when you hold one of these, you’re holding the whole of the known universe in the palms of your hands.

Actual Size Of Road Signs

Driving along in a car, you probably don’t think too much about why you’re able to read road signs so clearly regardless of your speed. That’s because their writing has been specially designed to be easy to process. Just take a look at the sheer size of them:

Highway signs aren’t made big just because they cover multiple lanes, but the speed at which you are traveling means they must be able to be viewed from further away so that you have enough time to adjust and prevent last-minute hazards. It's odd to think that much detail goes into something you see every day, and yet you never really consider the true size of it.

The World's Water

On Earth, there are roughly 1.332 billion cubic kilometers of water. It covers two-thirds of our planet with over 70% of freshwater locked in our ice caps. But to put that into perspective, if the earth was the size of a basketball, then all the water in the world would fit into just one ping pong ball!

To separate that out even further, if we were to remove all the fresh, drinkable water from that ping pong ball, it would be about the size of a small bead. And if you poured all the water in the world into a hole the same size and shape as the United States, that hole would need to be 145 km deep!

Water Shadows

If shadows are created by an object blocking a light source, how would you explain the image below? Light isn’t the same in all mediums, and in liquid, it acts very differently.

The wasp in this image is held afloat by the water's surface tension. The cohesive force of the molecules sticking to each other creates a slight indentation in the water, and this refracts the light slightly sideways creating shadows at the bottom of the container.

Ouse Valley Viaduct

Despite looking like a dreamworld doorway, the image below is the base of the Ouse Valley Viaduct in England. The arch vaulting pillars have been created using over 11 million bricks to make a well-supported, long-lasting bridge across the valley. In the process, they accidentally seem to have opened a portal into another dimension.

The Hand of Mrs Wilhelm Röntgen

This old blurry, grainy photograph may look ominous, but it's actually one of the most monumental leaps in science ever taken.

That is a human hand, and the large black lump is a wedding ring. In fact, this is the hand of Mrs. Wilhelm Röntgen from 1895, and it’s the first-ever image created through X-Raytechniques designed by her husband, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.

This picture created a sensation around the world more than 100 years ago and revolutionized the way medicine and science have advanced. This was the first time a human was able to look inside a body without taking it apart.

Brain Cell or Universe?

Anyone who’s ever seen a cauliflower has probably noticed the way it grows kind of looks like a brain, but did you know the neurons in your brain grow in a similar pattern to the expansion of the universe?

The journal of Nature’s Scientific Reports suggests that that these similarities aren’t just coincidence, and the growth of these systems is influenced by some unknown, fundamental law of nature. Further to this, the natural growth dynamic of networks like the Internet follows the same pattern.

Sperm Whales Sleep Vertically

Due to their giant size, Sperm Whales can’t afford to sleep for very long as their need for air means they could easily drown. But evolution has them covered. These gentle ocean giants are able to sleep for 10 to 15 minutes at a time by swimming down deep and then slowly, and vertically, rising up to the surface.

Sleeping vertically in their pods means they maintain social contact, so no one is left behind as a napping snack for predators. Research suggests they spend less than 10% of their daily cycles sleeping, making them one of the least sleep-dependent animals on the planet.

I hope you were amazed at these images that probably changed your perception of the world. Thanks for reading!