15th April 2010, 2:19 PM
Weltall Wrote:I read a book detailing why our visual range is what it is. Essentially, the rods and cones in our eyes are of a size that only that narrow band of wavelengths can register upon them. For us to be able to see far into the IR or UV spectrums would requires eyes that are either much larger, or rods and cones which would be so small that most visible light would be invisible to us. Even animals who can see into those spectrums do so only very slightly, and usually their entire visual range is shifted to compensate (a creature who sees UV would not register the color red, for example.
The sun emits more visible light than any other kind, so we got what is really most useful to us.
Fun fact: we can technically 'see' UV radiation with our skin, it's just that our brain does not represent the sensation in a visual manner. It would theoretically be possible to transmit all senses as visuals given a better understanding of how the sensory input is processed by the brain, though our eyes are a much higher fidelity input device than any other we possess. A visual representation of heat on the skin would just appear as a blur.
That's really cool. But heat creating a blur has more to do with bad juju where the heat creates a mirror in simple terms and we see wavering liquid. When heat is pushed out of an engine we see it as we would gas fumes but thats because the hot air is mixing with the cool air and the light is refracting from it. I believe all living things with eyes would see the same effect.
But all light is just radiation, even artificial light. All light is visible is including every tick on the spectrum, we just evolved not to use it. And that pisses me off. Eagles have UV and IR vision and have completed simple tasks such as picking out a red item from other colored items. Snakes have IR sensors but its not in their eyes so I have no fucking clue how they see. Where's our IR sensors? Where's our bigger eye-cones?? I wanna see UV shit!