Physics Beyond Our Senses
 Our reality is the end product of a cognitive
process starting from the sensory inputs. Space and time,
two aspects of reality, are just a part of the cognitive
model created by our brain, much like sound and smell.
Space is just a representation of the light inputs to our
eyes. This is the reason for the speed of light is such a
fundamental constant in our reality.
Assume that you are observing two particles moving away
from each other at speeds close to the speed of light. For
instance, you are standing close to the tunnel at CERN (not
recommended!) where particles are whizzing by in opposite
directions. Consider just two particles that are going in
opposite directions. You know that in one second, the
particles will be at a distance of 2c from each
other. Or so it would seem to you, but Special Relativity
(SR) says that if you were moving with one of the
particles, the other particle wouldn't be traveling at
close to twice the speed of light, but still under the
light speed barrier.
The Unreal Universe argues that the you would see
the other particle going away from you slightly slower than
the speed of light. In your perceived reality, the receding
particle seems to obey SR, but this is a distortion to our
reality brought about by the sensory modality.
SR (or at least the current interpretation of SR) insists
that this has got nothing to do with our perception or the
fact that we are sensing the receding particle using light.
But I beg to defer. I know, this is very presumptuous. My
argument is that if you are moving with one particle, the
other particle is "in reality" moving away from you at
twice the speed of light, but it just seems to be under the
speed of light "in your reality." This can actually be
worked out using fairly simple algebra.
Once we accept that our perception of space (and
consequently motion) is distorted by the finite speed of
light, we can find compelling explanations for certain
puzzling astrophysical phenomena. Let's consider an object
flying by at superluminal speed. How would we see it? This
is what is shown in the animation. The object flies by
across the rectangle and we are near the center of the
bottom edge of the rectangle. The object emits light rays
towards us at regular intervals. (Well, the object emits
light rays in all directions at all times, but we are
interested in only the ones are in our direction.) So we
can propagate the light rays towards us. We see the object
only when the first ray reaches us. As we can see from the
animation, the first ray that reaches us is emitted
somewhere near the center of the rectangle. Thus, we don't
see what the object is really doing. We see it appearing at
the center of the rectangle (shown as a black dot, let's
call it the core) and then as two objects moving away from
each other!
Now, let's imagine that a bunch of objects (like a galaxy
for instance) are moving together at a roughly constant
superluminal speed. How would we see it? Following the same
argument as in the animation, we can see that the group of
objects would appear as a series of knots appearing in
roughly symmetric jets. And roughly symmetric jets have
been observed (mostly at radio frequencies) in the last few
decades. They are called DRAGNs.
(Images of
DRAGNs are also available.)
Why do we see them in the radio frequency region? That
brings us to the second part of the puzzle. In the
animation, the change in the color of the two apparent
objects (which I call phantoms) is supposed to represent
the red shift of the object at the instant of it is
observed. It is not really done to scale (as you will see
from the Matlab function) here.
It is a more involved calculation, and is shown in the
article. The gist of it is
that near the core, the objects appear with very high blue
shift, and as they appear to move away from the core, the
apparent emission becomes more red shifted. (Note that I
have been careful to use "appear" and "apparent" all over
the place.) The shift from blue to red does not represent a
real shift in the energy of the emission, but is a part of
our perception. And it is not just our human perception
that gets fooled, all our measuring equipment (the Hubble
telescope, for instance) operate using light or
electromagnetic waves at the speed of light and are subject
to the same distortions. The discussion is already more
technical than I would have liked. A more thorough
treatment is available in my book, and of course, all the
technical details can be found in the article.
The evolution of the spectrum from heavily blue to heavily
red shifts has fooled the astrophysicists for a while now.
This is observed in what they call gamma ray bursts (GRBs).
Due to the apparent change in the energy, these phenomena
are associated with high energy, cataclysmic events like
supernovae. In my opinion, they are much more likely to be
artifacts of our perception.
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