Collection 4: "Coming to Our Senses" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

When thought of as an ensemble of experimental tools, our senses enjoy an astonishing acuity and range of sensitivity.

But before we get carried away in praise of ourselves, note that what we gain in breadth we lose in precision: we register the world’s stimuli in logarithmic rather than linear increments.

The stellar magnitude scale of brightness, the well-known acoustic decibel scale, and the seismic scale for earthquake severity are each logarithmic, in part because of our biological propensity to see, hear, and feel the world that way.

Does there exist a way of knowing that transcends our biological interfaces with the environment?

Fortune-tellers, mind readers, and mystics are at the top of the list of those who lay claim to mysterious powers. In doing so, they instill widespread fascination in others, especially book publishers and television producers.

We further would have no capacity to see the spectrum of colors that compose its emitted light, nor could we know whether the light is polarized.

Apologies to Edwin P. Hubble, the quote that opens this chapter, while poignant and poetic, should have instead been: Equipped with our five senses, along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors across the electromagnetic spectrum, we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science.

This simple fact is entirely responsible for why, to the average person, relativity, particle physics, and 10-dimensional string theory make no sense.

Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five
senses then a precarious life awaits you.

Discovering new ways of knowing has always heralded new windows on the universe that tap into our growing list of nonbiological senses.

Whenever this happens, a new level of majesty and complexity in the universe reveals itself to us, as though we were technologically evolving into supersentient beings, always coming to our senses.