Information about distance. If we don't know the distance, and we don't know how much light is being emitted, we might not be able to interpret the information about distance, but we will see that isn't important in determining how we see what we see.
Once we understand the fact, not concept, but fact, of expanding spheres of light, we have to understand how light travels. To do this, we have to know that light diminishes uniformly as it expands. This is a window into the nature of the frequency of light. For light to be diminishing, something empirical science doesn't like to discuss because it destroys the myth that its telescopes can see light from the end of the universe and the beginning of time, with light diminishing, it has to be traveling in streams that are expanding over the surface of the expanding sphere. Forget wavelength, think flows. Light is not only a series of frequencies, it is a series of frequencies that are connected to the series behind them so that as the frequencies expand, they retain frequency, but lose intensity.
This leads to the conclusion that light is a flow of frequencies that diminish over the surface of the expanding sphere each of the frequencies constitute. Thus, when the expanding spheres of light from the light bulb hanging in the center of the room hit the walls, they bounce off the walls, not as expanding spheres, but as flows of light. At each point a quantum of flow, and I use the word quantum to describe the amount of light the flow contains at that point determined by the distance to its source, bounces off the wall and begins to itself re-expand in a new expanding sphere of light. Why? Because light expands into the area available for it to expand.
As each flow that bounces off the wall re-expands, it has a new point of expansion, and a new measurement for the intensity, or strength of the flow. Thus, it provides information as to its source. This information is precise information, but like the light from the sun, the actual nature of the information is not known, cannot be known, unless we are controlling the intensity and distance, and more important in understanding how we see what we see, it doesn't have to be known. This is because the eye is not determining the information relative to a single flow of light, it is determining the information relative to millions of flows of light. All it needs to know is the relative difference between the flows to construct a picture of the distances the flows are producing.
While an individual flow of light contains information, it’s the relative distances of the millions of flow that our eyes use to build a replica of the dimensions of reality.
If we change our controlled room to a room with abundant windows and a lot of furniture, we can understand how knowing the relative differences in the information contained in each flow allows us to construct a picture of what we see. The sunlight is streaming in and lighting up the furniture. The furniture is solid, three-dimensional objects in reality. These solid objects are made up of edges, not just the back of a couch, but a back of a couch that stretches perhaps six feet, and therefore has thousands of edges making up its back. In short, there are millions of edges in the room the sunlight is bouncing off. As the sunlight streams into the room, it hits these edges at a different distance so that no single frequency flow hits more than one edge. This is because the edges are all different distances from the source of the light, the sun. It might only be a small distance, but the frequencies of light are very small, much smaller than the hard edges of reality we need for our eyes to define that realty.
As each of the flows bounce off a hard edge in the room, it begins to re-expand and thus the flows that each edge represents have the unique information embedded in it about its distance from wherever it enters the eye. At the same time, discreet flows from all the hard edges of reality are entering the eye. As the eye collects these flows, it can compare them on a relative basis and therefore has the information needed to reconstruct a picture of what it sees.
Thus, our eyes naturally deal with the physical dimensions of reality. How do those dimensions get from the eye to the mind?
(To be continued)
Saturday, July 19, 2008
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2 comments:
That former obituary link is broken. Here is another link to the obituary of Peter Bros:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newsobserver/obituary.aspx?n=peter-k-bros&pid=119306311
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