What you see

I must confess to ordering a pair of these back in the day, thinking I too could be an undercover lecher. Alas! They were a complete fraud, and I learned something that day about the world.... it lies!

But it is possible to "see" in X-Rays. Or in Radio Waves. Or infrared, etc. Here are some examples of the same object, yet the picture was taken in a different frequency. First series of pix is Galaxy M31, or Andromeda:

Radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray. And how about our good friend, Mother Earth:

 Infrared, visible, ultraviolet, EXTREME ultraviolet, X-Ray, and Gamma Ray. In the X-Ray photo, the earth is dark except for the Aurora at the north pole. The gamma ray view is showing particles from space bouncing off our atmosphere.

As you can see - wait, what is seeing? You can "see" in x-ray, or radio waves, or even gamma rays,  just not with our eyes, since we did not evolve the ability to perceive that frequency. Some animals can though. So, "seeing" is defined as the ability of a life form to receive and interpret specific frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, if there is no "receiver", there is no "seeing", right?


Thus! And in conclusion: If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? And the answer is: If there are no life forms to hear it, then no. Since sound - like color, like smell, like touch - only exists with the receiver, with life. Without a life form to translate a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum into "blue", there's no such thing as blue. Just as, without a medium to travel through, AND a receiver to pick up the noise, there is no sound - just pressure waves. Sound is the brain translating that pressure wave by frequency into everything you hear.


So, again: Nothing is as it seems. In fact, it's far more wonderful than you could ever imagine.