2. The deception of perception: Is the full moon really magnified at moon rise as Aristotle believed?

        As we watch a movie, emotions can sometimes fly high-if its a suspense thriller for example or a well-directed comedy that makes you laugh. And yet if we pause to consider for a moment-what are we really laughing at-mere projections of light and sound patterns on the screen and speaker-diaphragms? There is no actor, no action, no motion actually happening on the screen, and yet the mind can perceive it as being there-and if it is in say IMAX 3D-you may even get jolted by a drop coming right at you in a snap!

What we perceive as being an object out there-what is it really? Every school boy can tell you today that yes it is a bunch of atoms and molecules-but what does that really mean? As you touch your smart phone screen,  just a light tap is enough to send thousands of signals scurrying around and waves up and down the interweb to get you the information that you call for-perhaps thats how you landed up on this page in the first place.

Yet, what you are reading on this page-these shapes, are they really present? At each instant there are thousands of light rays/photons being scattered of long polymers twisted around in different patterns-none of them knowing anything about how the others are oriented and yet all of them at once appear to give the illusion of a font or a smiley or a depiction of NYC skyline for example- yet in reality you are just looking at a bunch of liquid crystals contorting in different shapes.

 And then take the fascinating physics of color-something that is not really perceived fully in the eye but only post processed by the brain using the rods and cones in the eyes. In the figure here, there are as many as a million colors that the human eye can distinguish and yet color is just a subjective sensation in the human brain. Ofcourse there are hoards of visual illusions out there to re-inforce the fact that the world that we perceive out there may not be as colourful or even "just as colorful" as it may seem.

Take sunlight for example-what is the color of sunlight-yellow? But it is the same sunlight that gives the rainbows after fresh rains if the angles are right-and if you see a very tiny section of sunlight it appears to hold a wide spectrum of wavelengths corresponding to different colors. Why does it then appear to be yellow? Because our eyes are most sensitive to detecting yellow and if all colors are equally present - it fixates on the yellow! So the color of the sun is not what it seems!

Or take the apparent size of the sun or moon at sunrise or sunset-in case of moon, it actually is smaller in its perceptual optical size, even though it seems to be magnified. Aristotle taught his students that this was due to refraction by the earth's atmosphere-however only now with the sophisticated photography equipment have we figured out that the moon is NOT magnified by the earth's atmosphere and in fact is apparently smaller at horizon. What makes it look bigger then? There are several possible explanations however it is evident that it is a post-synthesis perception in the brain that is responsible for this illusion, just as several others like the Ebbinghaus illusion-which of the two central circles is bigger?

What is the point? The point is-what appears may be far from what actually is! It is important to pause and wonder foe a moment-that thought, tht worry, that scenario which seems real enough to be paralyzing-could it not be just one of the myriad illusions of the mind owing to the way it has been conditioned? 

There is a joy in this recognition. A joy that has been immortalized by the phrase Eureka for example! A joy that belongs to knowing, to a glimpse of truth, of the nature of nature and illusoriness of illusion! This joy of realisation, of humble witnessing of what goes on beneath the veils of the illusion-the so called Maya is what drives the physicist or for that matter any seeker of natural science to toil day and night in the lab!

As Sage Ashtavakra, an enlightened yogi from seven thousand year ago says in his discourse to King Janaka,
yatra visvam idam bhati kalpitam rajju-sarpavat
ananda-paramanandah sa  bodhas tvam sukham cara ..(1.10)
 Just as twilight makes rope appear to be snake
such  is the apparition of this world and its space-time attributes,
Recognize the illusion, repose in the wonder of you, move blissfully!

1. Dreams of Reality, wonder of physics and Yoga

Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? - from the movie Matrix 1999

One way you can ensure that you are awake is by checking that the world around you behaves as expected-when you throw something up it comes down, when you fall it hurts as if the ground is hitting you with the same force as you hitting the ground, etc! 

In a dream the constrains of physical world are no longer valid so things can move as they please and there is no place for a rational or logical connection between events-they can be completely contrary to our day-to-day perceptions.

Yet what we perceive is necessarily plagued with inaccuracies like the seeming flatness of earth or the daily extinguishment of the source of life on earth-our dear star, the sun! Perception without acknowledgement of limitations of the instruments of it often leads one to world views different from the actual reality of how things are! A careful investigation to account for and correct the nature of errors of perception by careful observation and experimentation however can revolutionize our worldview and awaken us to a new reality!

As the Bhagavad Gita propounds (2.69): what is pitch dark of the night to the civilians, to that the yogi is wide awake and what is bright and clear as daylight to the civilians escapes the yogi as if covered by night!  Such was the story of Galileo who discovered that the world view held by Aristotle and his mentees for nearly two thousand years was incorrect, such was the story of Newton when he recognized that the moon was driven not by a force different from what ties us to the earth and such was the story of Einstein and Heisenberg who awakened to a deeper, quantum depiction of reality in which the Newtonian world view had to be discarded!  These are our modern yogis, who push the limits  for human thought and enquiry! 

The elation one feels at the glimpse of such cognition, the flash of insight while solving a problem for example  is like a movie preview for the bliss that yogis experience over meditative samadhi states! This humbling joy and deep sense of wonder which easily makes one forget the transient vagaries of our day to day world is  what, perhaps,  drives the physicist to engage in mind bending inquiry into Nature! 

It is said, in an ancient sanskrit text called Shiva Sutras that wonder is the very basis on which a state of yoga emerges.  ( Vismayo-yoga bhumika)

There is a cute anecdote of Einstein's interaction with an educator Rowe that highlights the role of the same wonder in driving the pursuit of scientific investigation!

 Early one morning, on her school's annual visit to Princeton University's scientists and labs, a teen-aged Mary Budd Rowe came across Albert Einstein. He was gazing at a fountain, "tilting his head this way and that and sometimes moving his hands rapidly up and down."

"I stood beside him, puzzled," Rowe recalls. "He said nothing for quite some time. Then he turned to me and said, 'Can you do it? Can you stop the water enough to see the individual drops of water?'"

Einstein showed Rowe how to move her hands until she, too, could create a strobe effect that appeared to slow the stream to individual drops. They experimented a bit to get the best effect.

Then they turned and walked on.

"Never forget that science is just that kind of exploring and fun," he told her.

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Welcome to the wonderland-the Yoga of Physics!!