The Surprising Ways Science Contradicts Our Common Sense

“Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.” In a conversation with Lincoln Barnett, Albert Einstein pointed out that hard concepts that are non-intuitive or in a way poorly informed cause a certain sense of illusion, a distorted form of reality. We, humans, are evolved to see the world in a certain way. Evolution has programmed us to rely on our senses to raise our chances of survival by selecting a subset of data out of a sea of information to facilitate our chances to not perish, killed or otherwise, in the rigorously hostile nature. For more than five million years our ancestors rather successfully used their senses to survive, reproduce and eventually reach the pinnacle of the food chain. Fast forwarding to a few thousand years ago from now, we started to experiment with our senses, conceiving a rudimentary form of the scientific method. We started counting things, making measurements, and observing the patterns on bigger timescales, resulting in a boom of human endorsing activities like agriculture and engineering cities. Although these activities were not directly in conflict with our common sense, they were the beginning of a scientific revolution that lay ahead that will challenge our epistemological structure.

Fast forwarding to a few hundred years before today, a subset of humans started observing the limitations of our senses. There are hundreds of examples to give but let me give you my favorite. It was just the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sir William Herschel was trying to measure the temperature of different colors contained in the sunlight. He devised an experiment where he split a beam of sunlight coming into a dark room through a hole in a wall and passing through a glass prism. He placed a thermometer in the path of each color and an extra thermometer just beside the red color (in the dark) considering it as the control for the experiment. To his surprise, the one thermometer he has put in the dark showed the highest temperature. How could it be that darkness had more temperature than the light that came from the sun? This question not only rattled Herschel but everyone who reproduced the same experiment and came down to the exact same conclusion. What he discovered was infrared light. Invisible to our eyes, our senses, and our agencies are more or less insensitive to infrared light. Infrared bypasses our sense of vision, creating the illusion that there are only seven colors coming from the sun. Although infrared light is not hotter than visible light, we won’t be going into the details of why the thermometer showed that.

The point of the story is that not only our senses are subjected to a very limited ability to comprehend the riddles nature has offered us, but also that our opinions about certain things, be it the fundamental questions of how we came into being to very day to day questions like how a cell phone works are informed by our limited access to our senses. The whole point of science is to devise new ways to detect, measure, and eventually manipulate those parameters resulting in the boom of technology. If looked closely enough, most things around you are ensembles of such processes. When Einstein discovered relativity, it was so counter intuitive (and perhaps still is to most people) it that in fact caused a breaking point in our understanding of physics till that date. It created ripples in the scientific community that gave him the fame that made him a household celebrity. We harbor the ability to surpass our senses and lead to more objective and accurate models of reality. Each and every day we are getting closer and closer to a better model enriched by years of counter intuitive (often ridiculous sounding) observations. To have a scientific mindset, we first have to acknowledge the limitations of our senses and from that point forward there’s awaiting a wonderland that will engulf us feeding our appetite for knowledge and perhaps the meaning of all that was, is, and will be!