The Car You Can't See: What a Blind Spot Tells Us About Hidden Dimensions

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every driver in Bahrain knows this. You are on the Budaiya Highway or the Janabiyah highway, you check the mirror, road looks clear, you start to move left, and suddenly, peeeen, a horn. A Hilux or a Land Cruiser was there the whole time, right in your blind spot.

If this is interesting, you should also read: “Did You Know? Dark Matter & Dark Energy: Why We Only See 5% of the Universe” — https://wjhnow.com/p/dark-matter-dark-energy-5-percent-universe/

It was always real. You just couldn’t see it from where you were sitting.

That’s the whole idea of this article. Just because I can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Let me give you a few examples.

The Crow

Last Tuesday, a crow landed on my balcony railing with a biscuit in its beak. It stared at the glass window and saw another crow, a rival. I just saw a reflection. It pecked the glass twice and flew away confused. Same window, two different worlds.

I just laughed at first, then felt a bit stupid for it. Poor guy was so sure.

The crow couldn’t see the glass. That didn’t mean the glass wasn’t there.

Our Eyes Have Limits Too

That crow stayed with me for days, because it made me ask how sure I am about what I see. And the answer is a bit uncomfortable, because our own eyes have a hole in them too.

If you know, our eyes have a real blind spot. Where the nerve leaves the eye, we see nothing. We never notice because the brain just paints over it.

You can test it right now. Draw a small cross on paper, and a dot about 8 to 10 cm to the right of it. Close your left eye and stare at the cross with your right eye. Slowly move the paper closer or farther, around 30 cm or so, and at some point the dot simply disappears. Not blurred, gone. Then the brain fills in the blank paper and you never see the gap.

The dot didn’t vanish from the paper. It vanished from my eye.

And it goes beyond that hole in the eye. Bees see UV on flowers. Some snakes sense heat. That light is real. We just don’t have the eyes for it.

Standing on the Ground

And it isn’t only about colours. Even where you stand changes what you can see.

Right now you are on the ground. You can only go forward, back, left, right. That’s it. x and y. Your whole world is made of that.

Think of Budaiya Highway in the evening. You’re stuck in traffic. You can see the car in front of you, the shop next to you. You can’t see that the jam ends just two streets ahead, or that there is a clear shortcut behind that wall.

Then you go up to the terrace of my building in Janabiyah. Same eyes. Nothing new. But from up there, you see the whole stretch to Saar, the sea on one side, and exactly where all the cars are stuck.

Or take the flight into Bahrain. From the window, the island looks so small and flat, you can see the whole thing, the lights, everything. From the ground it feels big and confusing. From above it’s just a small patch.

Bro, we are like ants on the road. We think everything is blocked. Go one floor up and you realize the road was clear all along.

A crow sees this every day. It doesn’t need a rooftop.

The shortcut was always there. I just wasn’t high enough to see it.

Flatland

Funny thing is, someone wrote a whole book about this more than a hundred years ago.

In 1884, a man named Edwin Abbott wrote a story called Flatland. It’s about creatures who live on a flat paper. They only know left, right, forward, back.

One day a ball, a sphere, passes through their paper world. They don’t see a ball. They only see a circle that gets bigger, then smaller, then disappears.

For them, “up” is not just hard to do. They can’t even imagine it.

The sphere was real. The flat creatures just had no way to see it.

Is it possible we are the flat ones here?

What Physics Actually Says

Now, is this just a nice story, or does physics say anything about it?

As far as I know, some ideas in physics, like string theory, say there could be around ten or eleven dimensions in total, with the extra ones curled up so small we can’t see them. But that’s still just an idea. No experiment has proved it yet, and many scientists don’t agree with it.

A blind spot doesn’t prove a hidden dimension exists. It only shows that “I can’t see it” is not a good enough reason to say it’s not there.

When We Can’t See, We Build

The interesting part is what people do with a blind spot. They don’t just accept it. They build something.

Around 1800, the astronomer William Herschel put a thermometer just past the red end of sunlight split through a prism. It got warmer, even though there was nothing to see. That was infrared, light our eyes can’t catch. About a hundred years later, in 1895, X-rays were found, and suddenly we could look inside a hand without cutting it open. Radio telescopes, infrared cameras and particle colliders came after.

Every one of these is like that rooftop. We couldn’t climb up there ourselves, so we built something that could. And each time, the “nothing” turned out to be something.

So, What Now?

I’m not saying there’s a hidden dimension sitting behind your sofa. I honestly don’t know, and nobody does yet. What I do know is that a good driver doesn’t say “there’s no car” just because the mirror is empty. He turns his head, and keeps looking.

And that’s the whole point. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Maybe we are the same. Maybe there is another direction we just can’t go to yet. And from there, our whole world looks like a small, open map.

So next time a crow pecks at your window, remember it isn’t the only one with a blind spot.

Flatland on What Just Happened NOW