Friday, March 10, 2017

Senses

Our senses give us a window on the world but they also limit what we see. For millions of years we hominids had no idea that there were such things as magnetic fields even though bacteria may sense and respond to them. (See Scientific American, December 1981, Blakemore and Frankel) We see that the sky is blue but that is as much a result of the limitations of our vision as it is the result of Rayleigh scattering. The eyes of birds do not let them see a blue sky. We may live today in a vast Hilbert or Fock space of which we experience only a tiny fraction. The concepts we create in order to describe the world depend in part on the array of senses we happen to have. This is one reason I have tried to give Asa H as wide a range of senses as possible.

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