Perception Definition and 138 Threads

I'm currently taking a modern physics course, I came across this problem which really threw me off guard: Three spaceships A, B, and C are in motion as shown in the figure. The commander on ship B observes ship C approaching with a relative velocity of 0.83c. The commander also observes ship A...

As far as i understand, we (our mind) observe the universe at set periods of time, say, our consciousness activates each 0.5 seconds for instance. This means that we have no perception whatsoever of what happens between the 0.5 seconds that exist between our perceptions.This led me to the...

We measure time based off of atomic vibrations, so time dilation from gravity and velocity are nothing more than pressure applied to the atoms, slowing their vibrations. This isn't an accurate measure of what we consider time, but more of a measure of the reaction of atomic vibrations under...

It is often said that we basically live in the past, since it takes time for light to travel from objects to our eyes and we perceive the world as it was. If we measure the distance and speed of light we can discover by how much are we 'living in the past', or when did some event happen...

Suppose you were to board a ship on Earth departing for a star system 1,000 light years away. You accelerate at 1g for the first 500ly, then decelerate at 1g for the second 500ly. Observer on Earth will claim 1,001.936 have passed during your voyage, whereas you will have experienced 13.452...

I was wondering how is our perception created according to relativity, since what we perceive depends on the perspective we have on the space-time around us. If two events are simultaneous in our frame by deduction from our perception we will realize that they are, and that the causal process...

For some reason I'm having a difficult time understanding the reason why air 'feels' cold when you tighten your lips and blow air from your body, yet it 'feels' hot as you exhale with a widened mouth. Why is this so? The only reason why I'm having considerable difficulty is because I keep...

Hey, I was wondering if anyone had read any studies into time perception before or near death, I tried googling it and get the anecdotal "my life flashed before my eyes" type deal. I'm actually more interested in studies and published works though. I was curious about the subject and would...

Physicists in all nations realized immediately after the experiments of Meitner and Hahn in 1938 that building a fission bomb might be possible. Was this possibility publicly known or discussed, at least in the US which entered the war only at the end of 1941? After all, people were much more...

First off, forgive me if I don't word this properly. I'm a furniture restorer by trade and have recently begun thinking about how everything works. Specifically, I have been thinking about the possibility of our perception of time and the actual flow of time. From what I understand, Einstein...

When I look at a distant light source (like car headlights, or street lamp lights) I notice colors of the visible spectrum (as separated (as in after prism refraction)) immediately around it and it's not just around white light sources. It becomes more obvious if you place something with a...

I am looking for a definition of sound. Does it have anything to do with what is perceived by the ear, and therefore restricted to certain frequencies? Is it even a perception or is it simply a longitudinal wave? I can find lots of physics material about sound, but I can't find a definition.

Hey everyone! I'm having hard times with one assignment and I just can't figure it out. I tried to answer these questions on my own and I sent the finished assignment to the professor. She answered me that I misunderstood the assignment and that I should try to solve it one more time. This...

I'm writing a video game in which the player's body temperature is a mechanic. From what I understand, human perception of temperature is highly dependent on the change in temperature as well as the absolute temperature. However, I can't find numbers, and that's what I need. Specifically...

I am trying to understand what 'violation of simultaneity' really means, and whether it has any real importance (i.e. why was it introduced?). The Wikipedia note on this (Topic: Relativity of Simultaneity): "... the relativity of simultaneity is the concept that simultaneity–whether two...

Its my understanding that a photon will travel and exist in space forever. My question is if light, whether it be from a distant galaxy or star, can be perceived after it has passed by our location in space. To me it seems a confusing subject to think about but i assume you can see a beam of...

The individual's perception of time has been studied for decades with theories such as the strength model and the inference model by William Friedman. Along with many psychological tests, many neuroscientists have observed the beginnings of an internal clock that exists in humans (which can be...

I found this site via a google search for some key terms I was thinking about. Let me preface by saying I have never taken a physics class, and I am definitely no genius. I formerly was an intelligence analyst in the military working with electronic signals, the concept that I'm now pondering...

What do you think the publics perceptions of physicists are compared to doctors, lawyers and other scientific disciplines.

Hi All. I have a little bit of a strange question I'm trying to figure out. If a human body was undergoing time dilation relative to another object, we believe that their brain, and therefore mind would slow down along with the rest of their body, correct? If this is so, and light...

Just something I was wondering about Schrödenger's cat. According to Schrödenger's cat, wether the cat is alive or dead can only be defined as a probability unless you observe it, but something else could be possible. What if we had 4th dimensional perception, so we could see the future. If we...

This is something that most artists know about, when they draw or look at something for long periods of time they will not see the mistakes, but when they take a mirror and look at the reflection of the drawing they see all the faults. Also, leaving a drawing/painting for a day will let you see...

Good day everyone, I am writing a paper on the topic of how the perception of time has evolved, over the course of big history. (For anyone who doesn't know what big history is, you can read about it on Wikipedia (I cannot link) Now, the way the paper is set up is that I take 15 important...

At what point does perception enter the process of evolution. Are all the mechanisms of evolution 'blind'? In other words, it seems that a tremendous power is ignored - an organism can perceive their environment so why doesn't evolution capitalize on this instead of relying on random mutations...

Does this look accurate at all? Sense of Sight - The perception of energy (light waves) bouncing off of matter (solid/liquid/gas) Sense of Sound - The perception of energy (sound waves) traveling through matter (solid/liquid/gas) Sense of Taste - The perception of matter (solid/liquid) Sense of...

When you consciously perceive something, are we thinking the thing we're perceiving? Not necessarily the same kind of thinking as a thought 'I'm alive'? For example, I see a cat. But what is that perception? Is it a generation of thoughts that produces the image I see? The stimuli makes my...

I'm really puzzled at our perception of fundamental physical reality… I’ve got it right or all wrong? (I am no scientist, just a curious person, so please bear with me.) Some constants first: - Planck time (PT): 5.4×10−44 s - Planck length (PL): 1.6×10^-35 m - Electron radius (EL)...

Hey all, I am curious. I was discussing magic tricks earlier today and how the "hand is faster than the eye." It got me thinking. How exactly do we perceive the world around us? Does the brain take frames from each eye and amalgamate them to produce a 3d model of the world around us like a...

hi i've been intrigued by certain "inconsistency" between light frequencies and the way we see them for some time by now. if you mix red and yellow you get orange, if you mix red and green you get yellow, blue and yellow makes green, blue and green makes cyan. Now in all of these cases by...

Homework Statement If you could hypothetically experience 1 femtosecond (1E-15 s) the same way you do normally for 1 second, how long would it seem to experience 7.078E-4 seconds? Homework Equations note: 1 femtosecond is to 1 second, what 1 second is to 31.7 million years. The...

If the probability wave of say an electron is smeared throughout the entire universe and all matter is subject to relative time experience, could this give cause to believe that our subjective perception of time is irrelevant to this question or to the opposite effect that past, present and...

I have noticed that during traumatic events say, car crashes, Although the crash duration is less then a blink of an eye, it feels like takes much longer. I think horizon covered a research of time dilation perception that failed.* Anyway is it possible incredible powers of the crash increase...

How many orders of magnitude faster does light travel than the rate at which the human mind is able to perceive it?

I'd like to take quantum mechanics pass fail and I'm curious if this actually has the possibility of looking bad on my transcripts -- I'm an engineer so I don't need to take QM and this semester my course load + everything else going on may be a little too much for me to do well in this...

Hello, I don't even know if this two are related in the way I think, but this is what i would like to know. for example If we traveled far away from the planet Earth and looked back at it (no telescopes), we would see a blue marble but would not be able to see for example our familly...

This topic has been dealt with many threads, in various aspects. I want, in this thread, to set up an example focusing in on all related issues and, hopefully, centralizing best answers and explanations. Example: We have a large black hole with a star orbiting it with an substantially...

Is there a perception of a "prestige" hierarchy among physicists? Just wondering. Are some fields (such as string theory) considered more prestigious than others? (like experimental condensed matter physics?) How does computational physics fit in the hierarchy? Of course, it certainly does...

Is perception reality? Does what I see have an effect on what actually is? Do I really matter? Or am I just a juicy little bug crawling across the highway of time, inevitably making my way toward the paths which the car tires of death do travel? Will the tires remember the unique quality of...

Hello I am not an expert in physics and only have minimal exposure. However, I have been struck by something recently that I wanted t bring up with experts in the field. I was discussing with a colleague the other day, the ability to imagine 3 dimensions. My colleague stated that most...

The possibility of "Perception" being a dimension? Is it possible that perception itself could be a dimension? Now think deeper, not personal perception, but instead the idea of perception in general. Because quiet simply, there are lots of things that exist that we cannot perceive. Just as...

Though this sounds silly in itself to ask, I would still ask it. Is there any animal or bird which lacks the ability of depth perception? How would the world look to humans if they didn't have the ability to perceive visual depth? I'm not a biology or science student. Therefore, please be...

So I'm planning a senior honors thesis that'll start next summer. In my last post, I talked about testing magnetoreception, which is kind of risky. Another idea of mine is to take human subjects into a dark room, use filtered light to produce light at increments one 1 nm, and note the longest...

Homework Statement A person on a bicycle is traveling away from a parked car. If the horn of the car is sounded, how will the bicycle rider perceive the sound? A) The pitch will be higher than normal. B) The pitch will be lower than normal. C) The pitch will appear to steadily...

1. One person wearing goggles and one person without goggles are standing at the side of a pool. Both see a coin on the bottom of the pool, and both jump into retrieve it. When they are underwater, the person without goggles sees the coin at a greater depth than it was when she was above the...

Ok so I was just thinking and realized that instead of a Cartesian plot, you can represent points in an n-dimensional space by drawing n parallel lines and marking a point on each line. Of course this is less appealing than the traditional plot because we perceive 3d space in a way more similar...

Here's a little thought experiment for the absolute/relative debate over the nature of space: If I am in a void, and I perceive a small sphere some distance away from me, and it appears to be moving from left to right, is it really moving or could I be rotating to the left? How can I be sure...

I was kind of wondering... What if everything i saw was just created by my mind? So let's say that you do not exist, i just created you in my imagination. Let's just say that somehow this is a vivid dream and someone somewhere created me to fit into this fantasy world just to fill it? What if...

I'm interested in comparing colors (represented as sRGB triples) in terms of human perception. I vaguely recall something about eyes being more sensitive to differences in lightness than to differences in hue or saturation. Does anyone have any information on this? Better yet, any good...

I have a snowmobile trail on the western boundary of my property. It is a heavily traveled spur of the ITS, and I allow the local snowmobile club to use my property for that purpose. They trim trees, bush-hog the trail, etc, but there is no expense to them for the use of my property. I like...

Does this make sense?This is the sensitivity of the 3 human cone cells. http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/4562/28030351.jpg This is the range of different colors that the human eye can see. http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/9397/31986914.jpg This color would appear white...