Accommodation

Accommodation may refer to:

Accommodation (religion)

Accommodation (or condescension) is the theological principle that God, while being in his nature unknowable and unreachable, has nevertheless communicated with humanity in a way which humans can understand and respond to. The concept is that scripture has accommodated, or made allowance for, the original audience's language and general level of understanding.

The 16th-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin is a key developer of the concept, in response to that century's discoveries in natural science, foremost Copernicus' theory of heliocentrism that conflicted with medieval theological traditions of reading the Bible "through geocentric spectacles". The concept of accommodation is thus an alternative method of Bible interpretation to the tradition of Biblical literalism, which, together with an insistence on traditional Bible interpretation, formed the basis for the Roman Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century.

Accommodation is not an innovation of the Reformation Period, but "has a long tradition of use within Judaism and subsequently within Christian theology, and can easily be shown to have been influential within the patristic period."

Accommodation (eye)

Accommodation (Acc) is the process by which the vertebrate eye changes optical power to maintain a clear image or focus on an object as its distance varies.

Accommodation acts like a reflex, but can also be consciously controlled. Mammals, birds and reptiles vary the optical power by changing the form of the elastic lens using the ciliary body (in humans up to 15 dioptres). Fish and amphibians vary the power by changing the distance between a rigid lens and the retina with muscles.

The young human eye can change focus from distance (infinity) to 6.7 cm from the eye in 350 milliseconds. This dramatic change in focal power of the eye of approximately 15 dioptres (the reciprocal of focal length in metres) occurs as a consequence of a reduction in zonular tension induced by ciliary muscle contraction. The amplitude of accommodation declines with age. By the fifth decade of life the accommodative amplitude has declined so that the near point of the eye is more remote than the reading distance. When this occurs the patient is presbyopic. Once presbyopia occurs, those who are emmetropic (do not require optical correction for distance vision) will need an optical aid for near vision; those who are myopic (nearsighted and require an optical correction for distance vision), will find that they see better at near without their distance correction; and those who are hyperopic (farsighted) will find that they may need a correction for both distance and near vision. The age-related decline in accommodation occurs almost universally to less than 2 dioptres by the time a person reaches 45 to 50 years, by which time most of the population will have noticed a decrease in their ability to focus on close objects and hence require glasses for reading or bifocal lenses. Accommodation decreases to about 1 dioptre at the age of 70 years. The dependency of accommodation amplitude on age is graphically summarized by Duane’s classical curves