Perspective

Take a look at the scene above. This is a photograph I took today. Picturesque, wouldn't you say? The windmill, the barn, the field. A lovely view of the countryside, isn't it?

Now look a little closer. Above the windmill, just over the trees you can see the roof of a house.
Yes, the windmill, the livestock - all of it is a model (at the Brekonscot Model Village)

Without the view of the house, your eyes are quite happy to accept that the windmill is full size. But, now that you know it's a model - you won't be fooled. Even if you were to cover the house with your hand, you won't be fooled again. Henceforth, it will always be a model windmill.

This is the benefit that perspective give us. A point of reference that we can use as a baseline to judge other things. And, in our own lives, perspective, the ability to step outside ourselves and see things from a different angle, is what we often lack. We make assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions are so fundamental that we're not even aware we make them.

Take gravity, for example. It's not something you think about very often. It's always around. hen you drop something, it falls to the ground. At about 9.8 meters per second per second, so I'm told. But we take it for granted that, if we put a book on a table, it will sit there in preference to floating off into the air.

And, if you were to conduct the same experiment everywhere on Earth - putting a book onto a flat level surface, however many times you did it, it would continue to stay there. So, one might easily say by empirical evidence, that gravity is a universal constant. Except that it isn't - wherever we tried this process, we were still on Earth. We were still in a Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere, at a reasonably constant air pressure. The books were all made of paper, which is carbon based. They were all done with the lights on (so we could see if the book fell or not.)

Now, perhaps light levels, or atmospheric composition, or the nature of paper doesn't have any effect on gravity. Or maybe it does. I really don't know. Perhaps the only way to find out is to perform this experiment in space, or on the moon?

Which brings me to the point of this blog: I read a letter to the editor of a newspaper a few days ago, decrying the amount of money spent on the space program or on projects like the LHC at CERN - money which they argued "could be better spent on fixing the problems here on Earth, like cancer research or climate change".

Climate change is a good one, actually. There is still a lot of debate about how much affect (if any) humans have had on climate change. We know that sea levels have risen and fallen throughout history. We know that the Earth has warmed and cooled. We know that the Sun's output is not constant. But can we determine the effect that humans have on climate change, to separate our effect from the natural cycles? When every reference point we have is tainted with the same bias - our own Earthiness? The answer is to step back from Earth. Stand elsewhere, and get some perspective.

In our own relationships, too, we sometimes see what we expect to see rather than what is truly there. If we are utterly convinced that people are inherently racist or sexist, then any slight - real or perceived - will be filtered through that lens.

If a person is convinced their spouse is cheating, then no amount of lack of evidence will sway them, and anything slightly unusual will be viewed as "proof". Lack of evidence becomes proof that they are good at hiding it.

Whilst we stay trapped in our own heads, and prisoners to our own misconceptions, we can never glimpse the possibility of what other truths might be out there, and what more there is to learn.

Make today your day to step back, look around, and get some perspective.