Entry for February 15, 2007

Illusion of Continuity!!

Did you know that anything more than 24 frames per sec appears continuous to us? Any two things placed next to each other at a distance of less than 0.1 mm appear to be a single entity to the human eye. Any two sounds reaching within 66 ms or less appear as one sound to our ears.

Wachowskis rather used this to shoot scenes like Trinity jumping to hit the policeman ...Neo dodging the bullets where in the actor appears to move in slow motion while the camera seems to move around him. Actually they used a technique called bullet time in which they set up cameras all around the actor and all of them shoot the scene from different angles. Thus if you have a 2 sec scene all you need are 24 cameras to give you 24 frames for every sec. If 24 is too big a number reduce the number of cameras to 12, interpolate a frame between any two frames and you are done!

Thus what seem to be continuous to us are rather discrete entities that are at finite temporal or spatial distances. To give you an idea a computer can bubble sort 1000 element array during the time between those two frames. As many as 500 wires used in Pentium IV can pass through 0.1mm. Google can search through millions of web pages for the string "you have been living in a dream world" in less than 0.5 ms.

Does it mean that even our perception of the world is quantised?! Does that mean that we hear, smell, taste, see and touch in multiples of least quanta!! why has this limit been imposed on our perception why can't we see between the two objects , why can't we hear between the two sounds ...is something happening in between those events or in that space between those two objects that God didn't want us to figure out!! Why did he choose to let us see the world only at a certain level of abstraction!! Why did he gift us with this illusion of continuity!!