How do we prove light exists if everyone were blind? Sound if everyone were deaf?

1:37 AM (of Friday, May 9th, 2025)

Today is Thursday, May 8th, 2025.

Continuing from yesterday's train of thought about how people peak in their late teens and early 20s, Isaac Newton created calculus when he was 21, Albert Einstein published his 4 miracle year papers when he was 26. They both carried on in their fields after their groundbreaking discoveries, gaining experience over decades, but they never surpassed the achievements of their prime selves. Isn't that fascinating? Both geniuses, both gained decades more experience in their fields, yet they never produced anything as impressive than what they produced early on in their careers, when they were at their prime ages.

There is actually a lot of innovation and discoveries being created every day. Lots of scientists and researchers are doing complicated experiments every single day in the background, testing out different chemicals and materials, doing lots of different math and calculations, in order to solve lots of real world problems. They don't really get much credit or anything though. Facebook has around 80,000 employees for example, a TV company could have 100,000 employees making televisions and designing them. These people collaborate together and work together to solve some problem related to their field, but they don't really get all that much attention nor credit.

The people working at the top companies are all gifted and genius individuals. They all got straight A's in school, went to the top universities, can solve any difficult math or physics or computer problem thrown at them. Yet they are anonymous. They are geniuses and they obviously excel, they can do anything that Isaac Newton or Einstein can do, can solve the same math and physics equations they can, and might even be better than them, but they didn't do anything groundbreaking like they did. Isaac Newton and Einstein had discoveries that no one else had, there wasn't even the word gravity or calculus or theory of relativity before these people.

Gravity existed in front of everyone throughout history, but no one conceptualized it until Isaac Newton. Things fall. Why? They just do. That's what every prior genius thought. Why is the sky blue? It just is. That's what nearly everyone thinks right now, because no one really cares, the sky has whatever color it has, and no one thinks about it much.

There are things we can't sense at all. We have the main five senses of sight, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling, but imagine if we didn't have one of them, let's say we were born deaf, it would be nearly impossible to conceptualize or imagine what hearing would be like if we had never experienced it once. We wouldn't even know that sound existed, because we wouldn't be able to sense it. Sound is basically vibrations in the air, so we might be able to get something close by feeling something vibrating, but it wouldn't be the same. Can we "hear" someone speaking by just holding them, if we didn't have any hearing? I don't think so. I think we can still hear them through touch only because we have some hearing, their body's vibrations vibrate our inner ear canal if even just a little.

If we didn't have any sight, could we ever learn about light and the visual spectrum? Light is just particles reflecting and bouncing off of physical objects. It passes completely through some objects such air or glass or clear water, which is why we can't see these things. Isn't that fascinating now? How come light passes completely through some objects but not others? Air, glass, water, are all different states of matter, completely different chemical makeups, yet light passes through them just the same. But anyway, if we were born blind, how could we imagine what sight is like? We wouldn't be able to. We wouldn't even know what light is, we wouldn't be able to sense it. Touching a lamp might indicate that it's hot and that it emits light, but we wouldn't be able to sense any light. We can't even imagine what seeing would be like.

So I'm sure there are things in every day life right now that we are completely unable to sense. Much like how a blind person can't detect light bouncing off of objects and therefore can't see anything, yet is surrounded by light everywhere all the time, similar to how a deaf person can't hear anything while being surrounded by sound all the time, I'm sure there are things in every day life we are surrounded by that we can't detect at all. What is it that we can't detect? We wouldn't know. We can't detect it. If everyone were blind, which it does seem that way often since people needlessly kill and eat animals and are blind to it, then no one would be able to detect light, and everyone would be living life being completely oblivious to light and not even knowing it exists.

If everyone were deaf, no one would know what sound was. To test this, imagine you don't know what sound is, watch a video of someone clapping with the sound turned off, now try to justify sound even existing. You wouldn't be able to tell sound exists at all just from this video of clapping. Now watch a video showing an empty room with nothing happening with the sound turned off, you can't justify the existence of sound here either, even if there was loud music playing, you can't sense that it is.

During a sonic boom, we would see the air collapse around a vehicle going faster than the speed of sound, and we would feel a big whoosh of air right after, but we might not assign it to anything close to sound.

It could be like this for magnets, maybe even gravity as well. Maybe there is a sense that detects these pulling forces, and it would be so obvious if we had it, but since we don't, we can't even imagine it. We can't imagine why magnets attract and repel, they just do. I've never read any good explanation for why they do this, even asking AI doesn't explain it. Magnets have north and south poles, and they attract and repel each other due to the magnetic force of their electrons. That's it. That's the explanation. To me, that's similar to answering why things fall, or why the sky is blue, because those things just are.

What if there were some force that we can't even detect with magnets? What if more than magnets had them, but they just weren't strong enough? Sort of like how if there are two phones, one can have their brightness turned all the way up, the other turned all the way down, both emit light, but one emits much more. It's the same with sound and volume. Some objects can reflect more light than others, some emit more sound than others. Likewise, maybe some objects have more of this "magnet" property than others, and magnets just have the most, but we don't even know this property since we can't detect it?

If everyone were blind, again this seems true since people are blind to the needless animal cruelty that they cause, it would be nearly impossible to even show the existence of light. How would a blind society show the existence of light, or prove it? Everyone is blind. We only have hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. How do we demonstrate the existence of light?

It's probably the same with magnets and other objects. What if they do emit this mysterious force, but we can't demonstrate that it exists at all. I'm sure there are many things we cannot detect at all, but exist, and are all around us, and we can't even prove its existence.

There are scientific tools and such we use to detect and measure things we can't detect. A blind humanity may invent a device one day that measures electromagnetic particles, which is light. But it would just beep or whatever to tell us there is electromagnetic things coming from this object, and that object, and every object, but it wouldn't be as effective as our own sight, it would not be anywhere close. It might be able to put a value on something, like this chair emits this much electromagnetic particles, but can it detect properties like color, brightness, its quality and beauty?

Oh yeah, beauty is hard to measure scientifically, but we can all sense it just by looking at something. For a face, people try to use facial symmetry, and it is a lot of that, but it also has a lot of unspoken and immeasurable qualities. It would take forever measuring and comparing every intricacy of one face to another, much like how it would take forever for a blind society to measure all the light in a room, which could differ based on the time of day too. And, there are also random beautiful things and objects. Some things can look aged, others brand new, like a bed sheet can feel and sound completely the same, but one can be new and the other used, although smell can be used to distinguish this, let's say they smell the same too, then this is still another quality that's hard to detect without the proper sense of vision.

Anyway I am getting sleepy.

Every single day is extremely valuable. It doesn't seem like much, but a significant amount can happen in a single day. A big exam, graduation, being hired or laid off from work, going on a date, starting a relationship, getting married or divorced, buying a home, selling a home, being born or dying, all of these can take place in literally just a single day. It doesn't even take a full day, a few hours or minutes or seconds is all it takes for all of these events to happen. They can be just one moment and one event, but are so significant in our lives.

Anyway, that was my day today.