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What Does It Mean To See?

Started by Solitary, July 09, 2013, 03:58:31 PM

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Solitary

#15
:evil:
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Jason78

Quote from: "Solitary"So scientist know what a sub atomic particle looks like when they do that then, like when I see something, right?

They get information about it.  Meaningful information that they can process and build up an image (for want of a better word) of that particle.

Quote from: "Solitary"How can it be the same if the size of the thing bouncing off giving information is totally different?

Photons are far smaller than a mountain.  You can still see a mountain.  Atoms are bigger than electrons.  Phosphor still glows when it's hit by them.  Size is largely irrelevant.

Quote from: "Solitary"Where one destroys the object looked at and scatters pieces of it and creates  new objects when light doesn't?  

Not always...  But you can tell a lot from a particle by the way it sheds it's excess energy.   In much the same way as a bit of a mountain absorbs a photon, excites an electron, and then scatters a new photon when it drops back down to its ground state.

Quote from: "Solitary"When I see an object I know what it looks like, and it doesn't go to pieces or create new objects.  :roll:  Solitary

O RLY?




Your visual cortex is a complicated arrangement of neurons that doesn't always see what you are looking at!
Winner of WitchSabrinas Best Advice Award 2012


We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real
tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. -Plato

Solitary

#17
:evil:
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Colanth

Quote from: "Solitary"Normally when we say we see an object, what we mean is that we detect with our eyes particles of light called photons, which come from a source of light. However, the idea of being able to see by physicist  observing particles that scatter from them is common to particle experiments that study tiny objects like electrons, protons, and my favorite "quarks" (out of which protons are made).
What difference does it make what the energy level of the photons is?  (Other than determining whether we detect them in our retinas or in instruments we created.)  Bouncing a high-energy photon off an electron and detecting it in a PM tube, or bouncing a low-energy photon off a stop sign and detecting it as a change in rhodopsin doesn't really make much difference.  (Except that the PM tube is a more direct method of detection.)
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.

the_antithesis

Quark also looks like this.



And this.


Solitary

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

SGOS

Quote from: "Colanth"
Quote from: "Solitary"Normally when we say we see an object, what we mean is that we detect with our eyes particles of light called photons, which come from a source of light. However, the idea of being able to see by physicist  observing particles that scatter from them is common to particle experiments that study tiny objects like electrons, protons, and my favorite "quarks" (out of which protons are made).
What difference does it make what the energy level of the photons is?  (Other than determining whether we detect them in our retinas or in instruments we created.)  Bouncing a high-energy photon off an electron and detecting it in a PM tube, or bouncing a low-energy photon off a stop sign and detecting it as a change in rhodopsin doesn't really make much difference.  (Except that the PM tube is a more direct method of detection.)
I never thought of this before, but that's a good observation.  We often put more importance on something we see with our own eyes, as if our eyes are far superior to the instruments we create, which of course they are not, not even close.  In addition, we take that upside down, reversed, and distorted image from our eyes, and feed it to our brains, where we can apply all manner of strange interpretations to what we think we see.  Of course, we do that when we interpret the readings from the instruments we create, too, but that's not the fault of the instruments.

Aupmanyav

"Brahma Satyam Jagan-mithya" (Brahman is the truth, the observed is an illusion)
"Sarve Khalu Idam Brahma" (All this here is Brahman)