What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a Black Hole

Re:What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a ... by AndrewKemendo on Friday July 13, 2018 @04:14PM (#17526305)

This is exactly my point and the semantics do matter here because they relate to the epistemic nature of the content. Namely that humans can't directly interpret X-Rays (or other non-visible light emissions).

We have to convert X-Ray emissions into images or mathematical representations which we then interpret visually/logically. So there is some level of information compression which we have to do just to be able to do some interpretation.

This is not a hit on them at all, in fact it's a genius workaround. All I really want to point out here really is the limits to our perception and the lengths that we go to, in order to transform non-perceivable phenomena into into modalities that we can perceive. It's an exercise in investigating the boundaries of our epistemic capabilities.

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Re:What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a ... by SiempreViernes on Friday July 13, 2018 @04:31PM (#17526433)

Strictly speaking we don't see colours at all, we just hallucinate them from the monochrome response in three (or fewer) filters. So, for example, we commonly confuse mixes of different colours with a colour between them.

In this strict frame of mind, it is not a trivial epistemic statement to say that "the highlight colour at yellow.com is yellow", since your screen can not physically emit yellow light.

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Re:What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a ... by AndrewKemendo on Friday July 13, 2018 @05:32PM (#17526897)

Yes, the rabbit hole goes deep in the perception question. Which is why I think it's important that we recognize the nested abstractions when we are trying to describe concepts - especially when they are interpreted from things that we don't have even fundamental perceptual abstractions for.

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Re:What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a ... by qubex on Saturday July 14, 2018 @01:46AM (#17529019)

”I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.

—John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, Battlestar Galactica

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Re:What Is a Blazar? It’s Like Staring Down the Barrel of a ... by mkagenius on Friday July 13, 2018 @05:41PM (#17526979)

x-ray shouldn't be that different from the other rays of light in its behavior in illuminating an object had our eyes had evolved to detect them. So they should be same.

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