Subtitled: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World
(Penguin Canada: Allen Lane, 2019, 366pp, including 15pp of acknowledgements and index.)
This is a pleasant enough book by a Canadian journalist. Her broad point is that there are many things about the world that most of us are unaware of, living as we do in a “reality bubble.” One way this is true is that many things are the way they are by convention, not because we live by some unalterable rules. Example: time zones. (This aligns with a key theme of science fiction: things might well be different in ways that wouldn’t occur to most people.) Another way this is true is that some things that we’re unaware of are just about the complexity of life. No one can, or necessarily needs to, understand all the details of where our food comes from. And a third way is more fundamental, that reality really does constrain what we perceive and what we don’t. Example of the electromagnetic spectrum and how humans perceive only a small fraction of it. There are lots of examples along all three of these themes… But they strike me as separate themes, analogous only in the broadest sense. So this is sort of a three-books-in-one. This is understandable, perhaps, in that the author is a journalist, for TV and radio, and presumably has been open to topics of all sorts that would be suitable science-oriented programming. (Also, very broadly, it aligns with similar works by Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc etc. But not in a hard science way.)
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