Concepts in science can often be unintuitive, seem bizarre and difficult to grasp.

We hear talk of quantum cats and extra dimensions, we are told that our entire universe was birthed at a single point in space. These concepts are really quite exotic, they havent been around for long and are born out of some of the most sophisticated theories ever created but cast your mind back to when you were in school and they told you about what are now seemingly trivial things. Tectonic plates for example. Oh, so the continents float around on a solid cored liquid ball? Its a bit like custard..? Weve come to accept these things now but it probably took most of us a little time to acclimatise. We arrive out our world view through a thousand incremental steps, each one taking us a little further into the unknown, we start with the very simple and years of facts later we arrive at some sort of understanding of the universe. Imagine you had to start again. Imagine a series of unfortunate events have culminated in the elimination of the science nugget in your brain. All normal faculties have been spared, your ability to reason and so forth are perfectly intact, you are a well adjusted adult save the ignorance of scientific knowledge. In this state, I expect it would be easier to imagine that science is some sort of tragic injoke perpetuated by the intellectual elite. The conclusions arrived at by the scientific method are nothing short of astounding. Have you checked any of this stuff for yourself? How much of your knowledge have you personally verified? Im not suggesting that we

renounce science, burn the textbooks and run screaming through the streets. Tie it up outside a shop and abandon it. But youve got to admit, when analysed from a fresh perspective, this is some freaky stuff theyre spouting. Thinkers throughout the centuries have dedicated their lives to diving into the unknown and searching the depths for their intellectual booty, when they surface we are so often startled by their spoils. Why should we be so taken aback? What is it about these ideas that seem so alien to us? A major reason for this is both glaringly obvious and, ironically, unintuitive. The world around us is, in a sense, a hallucination. The reality in which we conduct ourselves does not really exist. We have evolved to see the world, not as it is, but as it is helpful for us to see it in order for our survival. The world we experience is an illusion, a persistent, inescapable fabrication of mind. Physics tells us that the objective reality, if there is such a thing, bares very little resemblance to the reality that we perceive to be. This may seem fanciful at first, a fantastical musing bordering on lunacy but I ask you; what is colour? What is taste? Yes, we could talk about molecule shapes determining flavour and how blue is just light oscillating at a particular frequency, but that just isnt the whole truth, thats just a crude explanation for why a particular sensation is triggered. What is experience? What is it really? There is no blue out there in the universe, theres nothing fundamentally cinnamony about a

scoffed waffle. These qualities arise in the mind, and thank god they are there to deepen our lives, reducing this richness to some sort of exacting, mechanical existence is really quite a depressing thought. This subjectivity however, for all its virtues, is the veil which masks the real world from us. It is our expectation that the way things are should match our experience that causes our mental resistance. Take this mental misdirection and examine the scope of our experience and you get to the crux of the matter, you come to realise that not only is our picture of the world cloudy and abstract but it is only the smallest of corners of a much larger artwork. We experience a very select portion of the conditions that exist in the universe and this skews our perspective somewhat. We are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the universe using our natural tool kit alone. We are a medium sized thing with a medium sized view. If you were to take a hydrogen atom on the one hand and the universe on the other, examine their size and place humans on a scale ranging from former to the latter, you would find us slap bang in the middle. We dont naturally come across the very fast and the very slow, the very big and the very small, so when we stomp in trying to make sense of it all we find that its unlike anything weve ever seen and for some reason this surprises us.