Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by Max Tegmark

I find that when it comes to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it’s the second part that accounts for most of the differences in how they portray reality: what they omit. I think the same holds for our senses: although they can produce hallucinations and illusions, it’s their omissions that account for most of the discrepancy between the internal and external realities. My visual system omitted the information that distinguishes between black and teal suitcases, but even if you’re not color-blind, you’re missing out on the vast majority of the information that light carries. When I was taught in elementary school that all colors of light can be made up by mixing three primary colors red, green, and blue, I thought that this number three told us something fundamental about the external reality. But I was wrong: it teaches us only about the omissions of our visual system. Specifically, it tells us that our retina has three kinds of cone cells, which take the thousands of numbers that can be measured in a spectrum of light (see Figure 2.5 in Chapter 2) and keeps only three numbers, corresponding to the average light intensity across three broad ranges of wavelengths.