«At last we will know the way of an eagle in the sky, of a whale in the sea, or a tiger in the jungle» Arthur C. Clarke
«We assume that our familiar senses give us a complete picture of our environment, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are stone-deaf and colour blind in a universe of impressions beyond the range of our senses. The world of a dog is a world of scent; that of a dolphin, a symphony of ultrasonic pulses as meaningful as sight. To the bee, on a cloudy day, the diffuse sunlight carries a direction-sign utterly beyond our powers of discrimination, for it can detect the plane vibration of the light-waves. The rattlesnake strikes in total darkness towards the infra-red glow of its living prey – as our guided missiles have learned to do, only in the last few years. There are blind fish in muddy rivers who probe their opaque universe with electric fields, the natural prototype of radar; and all fish have a curious organ, the lateral line, running along their bodies to detect vibrations and pressure changes in the water around them.
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