The Perceived Universe

Everything you know of the world arrived through a sense. What does that leave out?

Put your hand on a table. It feels hard, cool and still. Physics says the hardness is electrons refusing to share a state, the cool is heat leaving your skin for the wood, and the stillness is a blur of motion far too fine to see. The Perceived Universe begins with a thought experiment: take the senses away one at a time and ask what would remain of the world. Then it gives them back, one by one, and asks what each was doing.

Across twelve chapters it follows the world through every filter in turn: how the eye builds colour from three numbers; how the ear hears pitch as ratios; how taste and smell assemble a flavour; what synaesthesia, when the senses cross, shows about everyone's perception; what bees, bats, snakes and birds register that we never will; how the words we speak shape what we see; which properties of the world are emergent and which might be inherent; how time is felt against how physics writes it; and how much of what we know describes what is out there, against what we are able to observe.

Every claim says what kind it is: established and sourced, the author's own reading, or a question still open and dated, in the literature's own terms. Where positions argue a case, they stand side by side. Thirty-four figures, drawn for this edition, show the physics as it is.

Written by a physics graduate and synaesthete who writes the chapter on crossed senses from inside the condition, and who holds that a correction is the next thing learned.