Length7h 20m
About this audiobook
DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING — Book Two
You see the world every day. But how much of what you think you see is actually there?
DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING takes a hard look at vision, light and the strange machinery behind sight. Why do you have a blind spot but never notice it? Are you really “blind” for ninety minutes a day? Is the eye badly designed? Can humans see ultraviolet? Do carrots really help you see in the dark? And what happens when the brain has nothing to look at?
From Victorian experiments and wartime propaganda to lasers, optical illusions, colour, myopia and the limits of human vision, this book follows the evidence behind familiar claims and finds what survives.
Some myths are wrong. Some are partly right. Some are stranger than the truth.
The evidence is always more interesting than the story.
Audiobook details
GenreScience and Nature, Education and Learning
Length7 hrs 20 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 1, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Part One — the Hole in Your Head
2Chapter One — The Blind Spot
3Chapter Two — The Ninety Minutes Nobody Loses
4Chapter Three — The Retina Is In Backwards
5Part Two — What Light Does to Matter
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter Four — Light Has Weight
7Chapter Five — Holding Things With Light
8Chapter Six — Colour Without Pigment
9Chapter Seven — Why the Sky Is That Colour
10Part Three — How Fast
11Chapter Eight — From a Guess to a Definition
12Chapter Nine — Fast, and Slow, and Neither
13Chapter Ten — Sixty Nanoseconds
14Part Four — Before Anyone Was Looking
15Chapter Eleven — Darwin's Difficulty
16Chapter Twelve — Forty Times Over
17Chapter Thirteen — The Mantis Shrimp Problem
18Chapter Fourteen — What We Lost in the Dark
19Part Five — the Brightest Things That Ever Happened
20Chapter Fifteen — The Guest Star
21Chapter Sixteen — The Colour of the Sky Coming Apart
22Chapter Seventeen — The Milky Sea
23Part Six — Building for Light
24Chapter Eighteen — Nineteen Metres of Dark
25Chapter Nineteen — Chartres Blue
26Chapter Twenty — Tracing the Old Masters
27Part Seven — Making It a Weapon
28Chapter Twenty-One — The Ships That Would Not Burn
29Chapter Twenty-Two — The Ships That Wanted to Be Seen
30Chapter Twenty-Three — Banned Before It Was Fired
31Part Eight — What the Wave Carries
32Chapter Twenty-Four — The Colour That Isn't There
33Chapter Twenty-Five — Shirley
34Chapter Twenty-Six — The Dress
35Chapter Twenty-Seven — The Colourblind Cuttlefish
36Part Nine — the Part You Cannot See
37Chapter Twenty-Eight — Somebody Chose That Colour
38Chapter Twenty-Nine — Either Side of the Window
39Chapter Thirty — The Ionising End
40Chapter Thirty-One — The Long End
41Chapter Thirty-Two — The Dog Is Watching a Slideshow
42Chapter Thirty-Three — The Eye Is Growing Too Long
43Chapter Thirty-Four — Bigger Eyes in the North
44Chapter Thirty-Five — The Aperture Is Not the Same Density in Everybody
45Part Ten — Things Your Mother Told You
46Chapter Thirty-Six — Carrots, Candles and Sitting Too Close
47Part Eleven — the Eye With Nothing in Front of It
48Chapter Thirty-Seven — Your Breakfast Table
49Chapter Thirty-Eight — The Man Who Walked Down the Corridor
50Chapter Thirty-Nine — The Grandfather's Visitors
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