Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Origins

aga - 4-11-2014 at 15:10

Quick one : is All science Sight based ?

Are there any blind scientists ?

It occurred to me that Sight is our main sense, and so there will certainly be a bias towards simply Seeing things, e.g. digital thermometer.

DrMario - 4-11-2014 at 15:16

Euler, the greatest matematician of all time, created most of his work after he became blind.

Watch this - I am pretty sure you'll be glad you did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEWj93XjON0

(Jump to 1:20)

I've watched that video a couple of time, and now I'm going to watch it again.

Little_Ghost_again - 4-11-2014 at 15:48

One of the worlds best perfume guys (I need to look his name up) is blind. Interesting question though, I know alot of machines like mass spectrometer run on windows software so you could use the speak thing to speak the results etc

Oscilllator - 4-11-2014 at 15:54

There is of course a bias towards sight, but how can you really know for sure you've made benzaldehyde without giving the jar a nice big sniff? :D

aga - 4-11-2014 at 16:50

Quote: Originally posted by DrMario  
Euler, the greatest matematician of all time, created most of his work after he became blind.

Watch this - I am pretty sure you'll be glad you did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEWj93XjON0

(Jump to 1:20)

I've watched that video a couple of time, and now I'm going to watch it again.

Fantastische !

The best video link i have ever followed.

Thank you.

(He'd be a bit miffed being called "Oiler", yet accurate in English)

DrMario - 4-11-2014 at 16:52

You're welcome - I am glad you liked it!

blogfast25 - 5-11-2014 at 06:04

Quote: Originally posted by aga  
It occurred to me that Sight is our main sense, and so there will certainly be a bias towards simply Seeing things, e.g. digital thermometer.


Of course there's a 'bias' but there are all kinds of ways of getting round that: having a full sighted assistant is an obvious one.

aga - 5-11-2014 at 16:07

My point is that if all of Science is sight-based, then it is likely that many nuances go un-sensed, and likely unexplored.

More exactly, the sheer effort put into where we are now, if it were to be put into say, sound-based 'observations' of the natural world, could well lead to surprisingly different (and maybe helpful) understanding of it.

Same goes for touch, smell etc.

Imagine the Beginnings, way back a couple of centuries or so, when Chemist #1 notices that when the Hot smoky smell (not reeking) and the weak Rose smell are put together, then a medium sweet Wine smell always happens.

Extrapolate forwards to now, and imagine all the way.

Oscilllator - 5-11-2014 at 16:19

It seems to me that although our observations nowadays are done almost exclusively through sight, this is not because the observations themselves are based on sight. All those high energy experiments at the LHC for example have got nothing to do with light per se, but we choose to present the data in a visual format just because it is easier to understand. It would be just as easy to represent it in an audio format, for example, it's just that it would be too difficult to understand the data. For example, the spectrum of hydrogen is represented audibly in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyi5SvPlMXc