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When one looks forward at a glass of wine, one is seeing it via the reflection of light off of the glass. But if you have a person to your right, looking to the left side of you (still in front of your face), he can see objects across the room that are not in your peripheral vision. Considering that the light which is reflecting off of the object to your left is passing directly in front of you to your friend to the left, why are we unable to see that reflection?

In other words, why can we only see the light reflections of objects in front of us, but not the light reflections of objects which pass our eyes from our left or right?

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    $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is a better fit for the physics stack since it about basic optics and not biology. $\endgroup$ – John Oct 6 '19 at 3:42
  • $\begingroup$ You can see those objects not in your vision range on a mirror because it reflects the light rays coming from that object perfectly towards our eyes instead of scattering it in all direction. It is simple ray-optics and I agree with @John that this is a physics question but I guess it may to too trivial over there so I don't know if migration would be suitable. $\endgroup$ – WYSIWYG Oct 11 '19 at 8:42
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You can't see light that goes past your eyes, only light that goes into your eyes.

Every seen a movie where there's a laser grid that's only visible when smoke is blown over it? You can't see the laser until a photon is deflected towards your eyes by hitting the smoke particle.

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Perhaps a better question for the Physics site, but light is composed of particles called photons. (I'm ignoring the wave-particle duality for the sake of brevity, and because it doesn't really apply at this scale.) A photon doesn't react with anything (like the light-sensitive chemicals in your eyes) unless it hits it. So your question is like asking why, if someone throws a rock from right to left in front of you, you don't feel the rock hit you.

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