Week Eight

Assignment:

Well this might be easy. One of the ways to confuse people is to not try very hard to make an image understandable! Einstein understood the illusion of observers thinking they saw reality, but in fact were seeing only what was unique to their location. For example if two people in opposite sides of a room snap their finger exactly at noon, they would see that indeed they snapped their fingers at the same time. However if they happened to be moving towards each other quickly (at noon), they would see that the other person snapped their fingers first. This is the illusion of relativity.

I’m sure you have seen the pictures of shapes that appear to be something but can be interpreted as another thing. Our minds can lead us astray without any effort! Take a look at the image below that I got off the internet. Are the blue stripes going at an angle to each other?

It does look like they are, but in fact they are exactly parallel. If you rotate your screen so that you are looking from the left or right edge, you will see that indeed they are parallel. If you cannot rotate your screen, take a ruler and place it over one of the lines and you will see that they are exactly level!

Human perception is just that, human, e.g. flawed, imperfect. Several years ago the internet blew up with arguments as to what color a dress really was. Everyone of course was right, and at the same time wrong! The fact of the matter was, that it was actually ambiguous, since every phone, computer, or tablet would have a slightly different color cast, and even that would change depending if you were viewing it indoors in warm light, or outdoors in daylight. And we all perceive colors slightly differently as well. But 99% of the viewers of course did not understand that.

So which way is up? Einstein was correct, it’s all relative to where you are viewing/observing:

(Up is the right side of this image).