The Sun Never Shines On TV

Did you know that you’ve never seen the Sun set?

I’ll say that again – you have never seen the Sun set.

It is amazing to me, that even now, in an age when man is so (rightly) proud of his achievements, in an era when our understandings of the world and the universe in which we dwell are so readily available, that when we decide to look past what we think we know and start actually ‘trying’ to know’ we find huge gaping holes in our knowledge.

We live in a world where up is up, down is down, the sky is blue and what we see we naturally accept as truth – irrespective of whether it is or not. The ‘sunset illusion’ is one of these truly remarkable natural events that seems straight forward; the Sun appears to drop below the horizon as we orbit it’s incredible mass, or in reverse it peeps shyly above the horizon , but in truth the Sun vanishes before we see it and it appears after we think it has.

This remarkable fact is caused by the path of light from the setting Sun being highly distorted near the horizon because of atmospheric refraction, making ‘traditional’ sunset occur when the Sun’s disk is already about one diameter below the horizon.

Huh? I hear you say?

Well, what that basically means is that at the moment the sun ‘vanishes’ beyond the horizon it is already eighteen degrees below the horizon. 

This, in effect, means that at this point:

There is no sun.

Take a look again – there is no sun.

The fact is that 'true' sunset looks like this:

Any point beyond that is simply a mirage.

To play with that idea even more – what that means is that because our brain cannot justify the sun suddenly vanishing, it takes the refracted light, the angles and the nature of the information and our brains imagine the sun. So, from the moment after the last picture, your mind is pretending that the sun is there, it is filling in the blanks to help us; and the camera that took the picture is doing exactly the same.

So, next time you are arguing a point you know to be absolute, or the next time you find yourself saying that something is impossible, stop for a minute and remember…

Because if the whole entire Sun, something we see, feel, experience, worship and love, can be an illusion – then so can anything else.

Limits cannot and do not exist.

egsconsulting.net