A visual quine: a chemical you make just by looking at it

By doing some generally regarded as pleasant activity with people, you make people.

Life is the original quine.

Of course, it's somewhat disappointing that any molecule you look at will result in isomerization of cis-retinal to trans-retinal - including a picture of the consumed cis-retinal.

Another interesting example where molecules will produce themselves is chiral amplification with autocatalysis. This article is fairly technical, but a nice example of a reaction product being a catalyst for its own (chiral!) formation: https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/ar9900820

Cute, but not a quine. A quine copies itself, not its input. That's a huge difference.

Not sure if this is a quine. A quine would be like if it generated the entire visual receptors themselves. Instead this is more like the "echo" command on linux, printing out only the input

Acoustic quine? Polibius effect

I <3 this idea.