The Squid and the Supernova: A Reply to Professor Egnor
In February 1987, a supernova appeared in the Southern skies, and remained visible for several months. Giant squid, with their large, powerful eyes, must have seen it, too. But if you believe that the act of perception takes place at the object, as Professor Egnor argues in his perspicacious reply to my last post, then you will have to maintain that the squid’s perception of the stellar explosion took place at the location of the supernova itself: somewhere in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 168,000 light years from Earth. The problem is that the object itself ceased to exist nearly 200 millennia ago, long before the dawn of human history. Even if the squid that witnessed the explosion Read More ›