John O. Campbell
At lunch today
with Anton, one of my Science Buddies, he enquired if I was planning to make a post in the near future. I explained that I was working on one
that I had hoped would provide a ‘simple’ explanation of quantum physics but
after the first eight pages I had realized that my explanation wasn’t exactly
simple; thus the long hiatus.
A main
contention in my attempt to simplify quantum theory is that there are large
areas of reality that we were not evolved to make sense of; the classical world
that we find familiar is only a tiny portion of the wider drama we are involved
with. A big part of making sense of theories which explain the larger reality is
merely to accept that they may not conform to the same rules as does the
reality we can directly experience.
A glory of
science is that it provides progressively richer context to our existence within
a wondrous reality. No other form of human knowledge even comes close to
providing the richness of details that science does of the exquisite drama we
are immersed within.
Much of my
leisure time is spent surfing science news for discoveries which extend our
view of reality. Today’s news highlights emailed from the American Association for the Advancement of Science
included an article on new research
concerning the visual system of trilobites.
Trilobites, which resemble
cockroaches, were the dominant form of life on earth for a couple of hundred million
years starting about 500 million years ago. Although they are not our direct
ancestors they are our cousins in the tree of life. A team of scientists has
just learned how to discern the visual system of these fossilized creatures on a
near cell by cell basis (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/looking-a-trilobite-in-the-eye.html?ref=em).
Trilobites had by our standards only a murky view of the world. Their visual system could probably discern only a few items of interest and could process only limited types of information into actionable items able to influence their behaviour. Trilobites were pioneers of the newly evolved faculty of vision. This faculty was a game changer as it provided the potential for a vastly expanded knowledge of the events taking place in an organism's environment. It was a new window on reality and together with the evolution of neural machinery necessary to make sense of the information, it is a direct ancestor of humanity's lofty abilities to understand reality.
The new insight provided by this research involves details of the lenses, pigments and neural cells of this visual system.Trilobites’ saw
the world with a compound eye having a similar design to that of many of today’s
insects. In itself this particular insight may not be world
shaking but we can well marvel at the tremendous privilege we enjoy of having
the details of reality which have evolved over the dimension of time since the
beginning of the universe brought more clearly into focus.
