Much that is of interest to the scientific community are phenomena that exist at scales beyond our temporal, perceptual, or experiential limits. Whether the phenomenon is cosmological, geological, biological, or chemical, our window on the world is really very small. For example, it is estimated that the universe has taken 15 billion years to evolve to its current state from the primordial Big Bang. It has taken the Earth’s surface about 200 million years to form the current continents from the supercontinent Pangaea. Our early huminid ancestors began their distinct evolutionary path about 7.5 million years ago. Obviously, changes on these temporal scales are not directly accessible to us within a life time of 70 some years, yet understanding changes of these magnitudes is the motivation for many important lines of scientific research.  Even within more contemporary time frames, our access to scientific phenomena is limited by our perceptual mechanisms. For example, we see light waves in the range between 400 nm (violet) to 700 nm (red). Many substances absorb light energy within this range and reflect complementary wave lengths that enable us to see them. However, many other substances either do not absorb light energy or do so at wavelengths beyond this range and thus they are invisible to us.  Size and distance also present formidable challenges to direct perception. Even with optical magnification, it is physically impossible for us to see anything smaller than 2 x 10-5 cm, yet the largest atoms are about 5.0 x 10-8 cm in diameter; the diameter of the smallest atom, hydrogen, is 6.4 x 10-9 cm. At the other extreme, the Universe is about 10 billion light years across and expanding at the relative rate of 50 kilometers per second per mega par sec. However, the furthest astronomical object that we can see with the naked eye is M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is only about 2.5 million light years away from us.

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