>That would mean we could distinguish between 16 million objects without
>moving our eye at all! The letter "l" in "resolution" just does not seem to
>me to be made of 16 million parts, something is not right.
It's the entire eye that does this, although the fovea can do some
rather prodigious feats. Some people can reliable identify faces
at a mile away - that would be quite a whopper of a resolution.
In terms of whole-eye function. I know one guy who can read an entire page
without moving his eye. I didn't believe it when I first saw it,
but he had read the page I handed him, and he'd never read it before
as I'd just written it.
>Even in the
>unlikely event that the fovea was capable of such a prodigious feat, I doubt
>it could transmit the description, and even if it could the brain is
>certainly not able to handle such a glut of information.
The brain is quite capable of it. It has about 1 billion neurons with
several trillion synapses devoted to just that function.