Revisions

THANK YOU. Thank you, everyone. The reason I’ve asked you all here today is because we have a very important announcement to make.

Where do I start.

Okay, so, as you may have been taught in grade school, there is a common belief about how human vision works. Or any animal’s vision, really. Uh, and I—I almost don’t want to get to much into the nitty-gritty of it, for reasons which will soon become apparent, but basically the idea was that photons are these subatomic particles which are produced—well, forget how they’re supposed to be produced—but they’re bouncing off things and then they’re captured by our eyeballs. And more than captured they’re detected. Right? This has been settled science for a while.

Well, I’m here to tell you—and I didn’t volunteer for this role, but I was elected by my colleagues—whom I thank for their faith in me—I’m here to tell you today, that it’s not as settled as we thought.

There are more than a few problems with this idea as I’ve just described it. I’m not going get into every one—I’m not here reading out a scientific paper to you—I just want everyone to have a general idea of why we have come to the conclusions we’ve come to.

The first problem is that, as it turns out, photons do not strictly exist. I’m not personally a physicist—subatomic or atomic or any other kind—I’m a biologist. Alright? So I can’t advise you as to how that mistake got made in the first place. But the physicists have all decided that, whatever else, there is no such thing as a photon. Go figure.

Okay, second thing. And here is where life scientists like myself, or like many physicians I know, this is where it’s our turn to get a little bit sheepish. Because it turns out a lot of what we had considered to be the natural receptors in the animal eye for photons—you’ve heard of rods and cones, haven’t you? Rods and cones? Rods and…? Well, you can throw that out. You can just throw that out in the trash. We really, I mean, we should have picked up on that much earlier. They’re just not there. So there’s really no way for an eye—human eye, fly’s eye, dog’s eye, or, uh, lacertine eye, which is my specialty—no way for them to pick up on a photon even if there was such a thing. In science, when we have multiple lines of evidence pointing pretty clearly to the same answer we call that consilience. That’s spelled—well, it doesn’t matter.

The point is, it’s not true.

So, obviously, this is egg on our face. A lot of leads we missed over the years—to be honest, a lot of things that I myself thought didn’t fully track, you know, that we were kind of in denial about. But it had to all blow up before we dropped it. It’s a little embarrassing.

But there is good news. We didn’t just call you all in here to have our mea culpa. Ever since the photon-theory of animal vision started to unravel, which it, um, did sort of simultaneously for dozens for researchers across many, many disciplines, all around the world at the same time, we’ve been working feverishly, very feverishly with a lot of concentration, to develop a more convincing explanation of the phenomenon. So we haven’t just been sitting around playing with ourselves. We believe we are closing in on an answer.

This is how science works, folks. Old ideas get nibbled at, bit by bit, bite by bite, by superseding evidence, sometimes contradictory evidence accumulating over the years. And a new theory emerges. Well—that word makes me wince a little bit, in this context, because I can’t in good faith call the line of research we are now pursuing—I mean, it’s not a theory yet. But we have a hypothesis we feel has been borne out by the experimental data thus far.

Essentially, all living things which can see—which, mind you, is not all living things and not even all animals, so we haven’t been wrong about every single organism on the planet—what is actually happening in their eyes is they are sending out, they are emitting a beam constantly—whenever the eyes are open—which is bouncing off of material objects and returning to the eyes with the information our brains decipher. Almost similar to how echolocation works—which, if I may add right now, still one hundred percent checks out. Okay? Okay. And that is how we believe sight happens. That is, probably, how you all able to be ogling me right now.

We call it the visual-fire hypothesis of sight, and we’re pretty confident in it. You’re going to be hearing much more about over the next few years. That’s not a promise, but it isa personal prediction. We feel really good about it.

This material which is emitted and bounced back—to give you the precise lingo, we say it’s retromitted—we can’t say too much about its exact nature as of yet. Some of you—not many of you, but some of you—some of you might be dying to point out right now, Nathaniel, visual fire, isn’t that—isn’t that what the ancient Greeks thought? And yes, it is true, there were Greeks such as, um, Empedocles and, and Alcmaeon, who subscribed to a very similar—a very similar-sounding explanation. And so, for now at least, we’ve borrowed from them that name for the material, the visual fire.

But I wouldn’t read too much into that fact. The Greeks who believed in the visual fire also thought it was wrought by the gods from the same material as sunlight. So you know—come on. Come on.

Right. So that’s a lot of big news today. What does it mean? No, you don’t need to go out and get your glasses changed. We don’t all have to go out and get contacts.

But even still, it begs the question, doesn’t it? If we got this wrong, what else have we been, um, overconfident about? So the other announcement I have to make is far more general and, you could say, prospective. The scientific community wants everyone to know that we are going to be checking in on everything over the next coupla years. Everything. Black holes, the immune system, the theory of evolution, gravity—I mean, some of these things sound almost fantastical if you really think about ‘em, right? Maybe some more than others. I’m not saying anything against any of these ideas, in particular. I’m just saying, it’s an ambitious endeavor we’re embarking upon. We welcome the public to join us on it.

I would be very surprised if this area I’ve spoken to you about today ends up being the only one that demands revision.

I’ll now take a select number of questions.

Yes?

What?

I would say I was personally very amazed and, um, astonished, yes.

Yes?

You know what, maybe we should stop right there. Thanks for coming by today, everybody. What you need to know is—we’ll keep you updated.