Mirror, mirror, more mirrors

Because I am a huge nerd, I woke up this morning thinking "once you consider something, nothing is what it seems", and specifically thinking about sight, and light. Think about it!

Sight is possible only because of your eyes, an evolutionary development spanning billions of years. Your eyes operate as cameras for your brain, and are directly attached to your brain. While we're here, you are essentially your brain and spinal nerves encased in a flesh machine that moves you around for the sole purpose of reproduction. But anyways, your eyes absorb photons out there in the world, translating these photons into different colors then transferring this information to your brain which "sees" whatever is out there.

Photons come from, are, light. Light comes from all sorts of things - including heat, since light is but a small part of the full electromagnetic spectrum, such that light and microwaves are close cousins. Anyways, light comes to us as photons, mostly from the sun. Photons from the sun take 8 minutes to get here once they leave the surface of the sun, but can be trapped within the sun for millions of years, so yes - the light hitting you right now from the sun is millions of years old. This light is created as a by-product of the fusion going on in the center of the sun, and I could go on and on about fusion but let's save that for another day.

Everything you see, every color and texture, is the result of photons striking that object, and based on the materials of that object, it reflects some photons back. In the case of a sunflower, for example, a lot of these reflected photons are yellow. These reflected photons strike your eyes which translate and transfer to your brain, and you "see".

Makes sense, right? But then - and here's my conclusion! - this is but the start of the realization, for the next understanding will make this tale of reflected photons questionable: Light acts as a wave, not particular photons, and can be understood as a small part of a much larger "field", the electromagnetic field. But that's a story for yet another day. Manana, maybe.

So, you see, nothing, and I mean nothing, is what you actually think it is. The question that results from this understanding: Yeah, OK? So what?

Good question!