When snorkeling, scuba diving, or just swimming with goggles, you don’t need corrective glass, why does water do this and not air? Both are transparent continuous fluids.
I don’t think that is some universal thing at all, because people do wear contact lenses or diving eyeglasses or prescription dive masks.
I wear glasses, and if I swim with goggles, everything is blurry.
However, there are some interesting optical things that happen with the water. Between the reduced distance you can see and the funky stuff that refractive indices can do, I can understand it feeling like your vision is corrected.
I have a pet peeve about universalizing one’s personal experience. If I felt like my vision were corrected underwater, I wouldn’t assume everyone else’s was too.
A factor may be that you don’t see far in water, and details are big (think these black line at the bottom of the pool, not really hard to see)
Attenuation length is shallow water is relatively short, so even with googles and perfect distance vision, you won’t see much behind 10-20m, and may-be 40-80m in deep water (bit there it’s dark).
Mary glasses wearer still have a vision good enough to see decently at 10m especially when they don’t look for ultra small details.
Also air is not normally a liquid where most people live.
Air is a fluid; gases & liquids are both fluids
