Ian, you mindreader. That is *exactly* what my next direction
was going to be. You blew me away with that right there.
I went through the trouble of pulling this together because I'm
on a quest to come up with an accurate relativistic subjective.
For example, the furthest confirmed (should you believe Guinness
Book tongue emoticon ) distance sound has traveled as heard by
human ear is 10.5 miles, at night, in a boat in the ocean. Speed
of sound is approximately 1100 feet per second. [I tested it at
different temperatures; the difference in speed of sound between
below freezing temperatures and a really hot day in the desert
is *not* that much of a difference, so 1100 was acceptable].
So, that sound likely took 50 seconds to get there.
That means, relatively confirmed, a human being can hear up to
50 seconds in the past.
The distance our vision goes back into the past is more commonly
discussed.
So I wanted to go through all of the senses, find their ranges,
and make a general Time Map of our perceptions, which will
include distance; the blueprint of spacetime that we "take up"
as we go about our day.
But I didn't feel as if I could do that accurately, if I didn't
first get a list of all the senses used by all the life forms on
Earth, at least as they're used currently. So instead of relying
on Wikipedia, I used the Gene Ontology to get my information - a
much more stressful process than anticipated, but I learned a
lot about OBO and OWL and gained a few nice tools in the
process.
So still working on it and even that's not the final result, but
Time-to-the-past + Distance measurements are my next step. In
the end, I'm trying to take the "oh wow spooky" crap out of a
lot of this stuff, and just be able to "say it like it is".
Hearing science educators go, "Did you know you're REALLY
LOOKING IN THE PAST! Oooooh SPOOKY!" makes me want to vomit.
It's simply a fact, it should be taught like a fact [or a darned
good theory - whatever] - and then people can actually start
*utilizing* relativistic thinking [eventually].... but not as
long as they keep up the "spooky true science - isn't science
awesome?" game.
