Optic Fibres Are Weird...

This is a bundle of optic fibers. It's called an optical taper. It used to be part of a larger rod of optic fibers and someone heated it up and stretched one end to make it thinner. So why does it behave in this strange way where text and images jump from one surface to the other and are either magnified or shrunk down depending on which way round you have it. Well, you might have come across which is a naturally occurring version of this. It's a mineral that forms lots of tiny optical tubes just like a bundle of optic fibers. Sometimes it's called a TV stone. Well, the same thing is happening with this. Every fiber optic pixel on this surface corresponds to a pixel on this surface, except they've all been narrowed so the image is focused onto a smaller area or vice versa when you flip it that.