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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
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Our Limited Senses
Saturday, January 25, 2014
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!
Saturday, January 25, 2014
The Electromagnetic Spectrum
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“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.”
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“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.”
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Human and Inhuman Color Vision
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[light top demo]
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Maxwell and his followers established that mixtures of three spectral colors are sufficient to match any perceived color.
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[light beam demo, color ball demo]
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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.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
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.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Or rather, what we see (as color) is hashed chords, where the notes have been mushed into three lumpen-sounds.
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Most mammals have poor color vision.
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what you see what Fido sees
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what you see what Toro sees
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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!
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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?
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[mantis shrimp video]
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Polarization
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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.
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[transverse wave demo]
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There is useful information in polarization, too.
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[linear polarization demo, circular polarization demo]
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Polarization doubles the dimension of color space
- which was already infinite-dimensional!
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Opening New Channels
The Coding Paradigm
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Infrared Images
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Ultraviolet Images
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We can synthesize new receptors as physical “pre-processors”, quite easily, by procedures related to Maxwell’s color box idea.
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My philosophy:
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If mantis shrimps can handle it, so can we.
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So I look forward, with anticipation and confidence, to seeing more dimensions in color space.
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With the doors of our perception expanded
We will get closer to things as they are, Infinite.
Saturday, January 25, 2014