The unseen world before our eyes

Do you consider yourself an observant person?

By taking a careful look at the world around us, it is easy to feel we have a decent grasp on things. We can: observe people with their unique, or not so unique, styles; pay close attention to our professors during a lecture and smirk at the people we see falling asleep; and perhaps amuse ourselves with the odd behavior of the local wildlife.

True enough, the most common way we experience our world is by sight. As a consequence, it is easy for us to become “vision chauvinists” by believing the world exists solely as it looks.

But as we have known since elementary school, we have four other senses. What we didn’t learn is what actually makes up the physical, but unseen, reality that our senses are detecting.

Sound, for instance, is the way our ears interpret rapid and tiny vibrations moving through the air. This is similar to how we can feel the floor tremble when someone drops a heavy object. Our senses of smell and taste are due to the ability to recognize and distinguish between individual molecules, as if our nose and tongue were portable CSI labs.

While considering things unseen, we must also not forget about atoms. As was recently pointed out in an Indiana Daily Student column by Kate Slabosky, there are about 10 quintillion water molecules in just a single snowflake, making each one its own tiny universe.

And on the other side of the spectrum, some of the “stars” that we see at night are in fact galaxies. Compared to the size of a galaxy, a person would be even smaller than one of those single water molecules is compared to a snowflake.  But to us, a galaxy is just an insignificant point of light. So the world we perceive around us is much more complicated than it initially appears. But are there still other things that none of our senses can even begin to understand?

If you lock yourself in a soundproof room and turn off the lights, the world is still interacting with you in ways you are unable to see, hear or feel. For instance, the radio waves that carry cell phone signals are constantly travelling through your body at the speed of light.

Additionally, as the sun performs constant nuclear fusion, it emits an endless stream of tiny particles called neutrinos which will pass harmlessly through the entire earth. About 1 trillion of these neutrinos will be passing through your body every second; they are doing so even now as you read this column.

Beyond our sun, explosions of distant and ancient stars produce things known as cosmic rays, which behave much like neutrinos, as they constantly pass through your unknowing body. Cosmic rays are much larger however, so they occasionally interact with matter.

You can see just about how often they do this at Bloomington’s own Wonderlab science museum with an exhibit promoted by IU physics professor Rick Van Kooten.

No matter how closely you pay attention, there are things about our world you can never directly observe. Such things can only be discovered and understood through our wonderfully developed scientific understanding of the world.


E-mail: tylatkin@indiana.edu