Limitations of Perception

Ah, the complexity, the inconceivable nature of Nature.

As stated in that video, our perception is very limited indeed. The animal Richard Feynman mentions, whose sensory organs are suited to visually perceive things we cannot, is the pit viper. It has infrared sensory perception, and can “see” heat waves coming off the body of the tiny field mouse.

Off the other end of the (human) visible spectrum, the common honey bee has extended ultraviolet sensory perception. A simple white flower seen by a bee has multitudinous patterns and additional “colors.” Do you understand now that only perception's limitations define our reality? That reality, when defined solely by our perception, is therefore necessarily incomplete?

What’s important is that these extra colors, or waves, actually exist. Even if we can’t see it, the mouse does give off heat and the flower does have ultraviolet patterns on its petals.

There are yet further examples of this: dogs hear higher frequencies than humans, bats higher frequencies still; elephants and whales hear deep infrasound.

No animal can perceive radio waves, but with a wire and a little selective tuning and amplification we can hear many broadcasts anywhere we happen to be. In fact, we don't even need the selective tuning: if we do not fine-tune, we will find what our audio equipment perceives all the time: a mess of noise at all possible frequencies going in all possible directions. Despite our usual blindness to it, this mess of noise is a very real part of the reality in which we live.

To eliminate this noise from our audio signal, we must first be able to perceive it from the audio equipment's vantage point, not ours.

So let us turn our attention in earnest to quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics describes exactly what is going on, not how it looks to humans. Forget the “stationary nucleus and the moving orbits of electrons”: that's pre-1910 modeling. In quantum electrodynamics, we consider electromagnetic radiation in discrete little particles called photons. Photons, in great numbers, are responsible for statistically influencing the probability, known as the amplitude, of the state of electrons. They can behave--in great numbers--statistically in what we like to call a wave, but each individual photon has no frequency of its own, because it is not a wave when you consider only one. They are more like a shower of raindrops that fall in infinite directions. Just the energy of movement.

Photons are responsible for what we used to call electromagnetic fields.