"Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large."...Of course, that's true. Try as I might, I cannot realistically think about very large and very small things. I do try. I understand the concepts, but I know what I'm picturing in my mind is still stuck in the middle and nowhere near the truly large and the truly small that exists out there and in there.
Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins.
We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.
This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms.
July 12, 2005
Living in middle world.
Richard Dawkins:
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8 comments:
Who says you should think about the very small or the very large "realistically"? Or , perhaps, what do you mean by realistic?
I'm a working scientist and I would characterize most of my thinking as abstract.
Realistic thinking is for finances, diet, politics, etc.
I mean to have an accurate mental picture. When I picture an elephant or a fly I picture the size realistically in my head. I can't picture a galaxy or an atom however. Not realistically.
Take a look at
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/
for a journey down the span from 10^22 to 10^-10. It does give a mental picture.
Though this particular demonstration is not ideal for making the concept manifest, the universe is stiff with pan-scalar repetitions, as for instance a spiral galaxy, a hurricane, a tornado, a whirlwind an eddy.
You can speculate, not without tantalizing evidence, that the universe is a hologram. But, "'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so...."
Slac: I'm more interested in relating to middle world, and lawproffing is working out quite okay for that.
A good place to get the Massive vs. Tiny scale, is out in the desert. Stand there and see: off across the Mojave are mountains far away, at your feet is sand, nearby is a rock the size of a three-story house, which could be a pebble or a grain of sand. When night falls the sky lights up like nowhere else and the stars and distance of space is nearly either levitating or crushing - it's a good place to actually feel the push and polarity of massive scales.
Even just driving it, Hwy 50: you look at your map and the road is a dead-straight line to the horizon, then past the map-fold it takes a slight turn to the right, maybe twenty degrees or whatever, from 12 O'clock to 2 O'clock. You look up and see the road going straight away and away, straight into the distance, and way-way far up there you see a bend - and it takes a half-hour to get there.
Maybe that is what's-up with the whole 40-days-in-the-desert thing; you've got distance-and-size, the temeperature-range, and even light-and-dark: it's painfully bright in daytime and when night comes darkness crashes down.
Oh yeh, and Scales of Velocity, the desert can get you up to speed on a long straight road until you just stop accelerating and you blast along at whatever the car or bike will do. After adjustment to skimming along like that at 130 or better, slowing down to 65 feels like you could just get out and push to go faster. Maybe it's more noticeable on a bike, but speed also accentuates the Mph/Kph Euro-scale difference, might lead you to think they like to count high just to impress...
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