[Physics] Why can I see the face in a spoon

Question

If I hold a spoon with the concave side facing me, it approximates a concave mirror.

If my eye is symbolised with an arrow, then we can represent the situation like this:

The problem then arises. The image clearly forms below the eye and the rays all spread out below the median line, whereas my poor eye is above the line – so I shouldn't see any image.

I can however see my face when I do this with a spoon (very ridiculous to see grown man doing this). I do admit that there is one ray that I should be able to see:

However, is this singular ray able the only reason I can see my face or is there something else I'm missing?

Answer 1

Just to clarify, for you to see anything clearly at all, you do need multiple light rays traveling at multiple angles, hitting your eye lens at different points. Your eye lens focuses all these rays to a point on the retina, where their intensities add together to form a signal your retina registers.

And with the spoon example, this is exactly what happens! Let's review the steps.

1. Light bounces off of a point of your face. Because light rays come in from different angles, and your face is bumpy, these light rays scatter in all directions.
2. Some of the light rays bouncing off of that point of your face go in the direction of the spoon. These rays hit the spoon at multiple points and reflect off of the spoon.
3. Because the spoon is shiny and concave, it acts as a concave mirror, and focuses those reflected rays through a point in space somewhere between you and the spoon. This point is the real image formed by the spoon.
4. The real image acts as a new source of light which your eye can "focus onto": some of the light rays leaving this real image hit the lens of your eye, at multiple points of the lens, and are focused down to a single point on your retina.

To get a good understanding of how you (or a camera) can see something, it is often helpful to include your eye lens (camera lens) and retina (sensor plane) in the ray diagram. I've drawn such a diagram below that illustrates the steps above.

EDIT: Looking at Ryan's answer, I see your main confusion might have just been the arrow directions. But even in your model in which the pupil is a single point, it is good to remember you still should think of each "ray" that passes through the pupil as really a bundle of rays that can diverge or converge as it travels through space.