expanding the doors of perception - frank wilczek

Expanding the Doors of Perception

Saturday, January 25, 2014

If the doors of perception were cleansed

Man would see things as they are, Infinite.

- William Blake

Our Limited Senses

Our unaided senses sample a pathetically small fraction of what’s out there in the physical world.

We have, of course, learned to augment them in many ways.

Nevertheless, we’ve left a lot on the table!

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

“We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists

in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is

the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”

“One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.”

Human and Inhuman Color Vision

[light top demo]

Maxwell and his followers established that mixtures of three spectral colors are sufficient to match any perceived color.

[light beam demo, color ball demo]

Much later, biologists discovered that there are three different kinds of color receptor proteins in the normal human eye.

Lack of one or more of those receptors results in color blindness.

Human eyes are photon counters.

The way we handle different frequencies of light is quite different from, and much cruder than, the way we handle different frequencies of sound.

We can imagine, but we do not directly sense, separate “color chords” in play at each point of an image.

Or rather, what we see (as color) is hashed chords, where the notes have been mushed into three lumpen-sounds.

Most mammals have poor color vision.

what you see what Fido sees

what you see what Toro sees

On the other hand, several kinds of bees, birds, and butterflies have 4 or even 5 color receptors, and sense ultraviolet (or, more rarely, infrared).

And then there’s the mantis shrimp!

The extraordinary visual apparatus of the mantis shrimp raises many fascinating questions, including:

How and when did it evolve?

What is the mantis shrimp seeing, that’s so important to it?

How does it process so much complicated information?

[mantis shrimp video]

Polarization

Polarization is another aspect of light to which human vision is not sensitive (though several animals are, including the mantis shrimp).

It arises from the transverse nature of light waves.

[transverse wave demo]

There is useful information in polarization, too.

[linear polarization demo, circular polarization demo]

Polarization doubles the dimension of color space

- which was already infinite-dimensional!

Opening New Channels

The Coding Paradigm

Infrared Images

Ultraviolet Images

We can synthesize new receptors as physical “pre-processors”, quite easily, by procedures related to Maxwell’s color box idea.

My philosophy:

If mantis shrimps can handle it, so can we.

So I look forward, with anticipation and confidence, to seeing more dimensions in color space.

With the doors of our perception expanded

We will get closer to things as they are, Infinite.

expanding the doors of perception - frank wilczek

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