看不见的世界 / The Unseen World

Author: Dexin Kong
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3831-5725
Structured and refined with assistance from ChatGPT
AI Automatic Translation (Unreviewed)

Background

The author once happened to meet the CEO of a GIS company at an event.

The author was never particularly good at socializing, and the other person did not seem especially talkative either. The atmosphere quickly became a little awkward.

To ease the situation, the author casually brought up a few topics related to mapping, urban modeling, and digital twins.

Unexpectedly, the conversation opened up almost immediately.

The CEO held a PhD degree and had originally come from an academic background before moving into the business world.

Discussion

As the discussion went deeper, the author asked a question:

“Can digital twins completely reconstruct the real world?”

The answer was unexpected:

“It is not a question of whether we can. It is a question of whether there is any need to.”

He continued.

There are many spectra in nature that human eyes cannot see without optical instruments.

There are microorganisms that cannot be observed without microscopes.

There are sounds human ears cannot hear, while bats can.

So even if reality itself were perfectly reconstructed, humans still would not see what they were never capable of seeing, nor hear what they were never capable of hearing.

What would be the point?

In that sense, the current technical boundaries of digital twins are, in practice, constructed around the boundaries of human perception itself.

What people usually describe as “nonexistent” may, more accurately, simply mean:

“Outside the range of perception.”

Perhaps the unseen parts of the world are far larger and far more complex than the parts we are able to perceive.

Note:
This project is an ongoing independent research effort developed in spare time.
Because of limited time and maintenance capacity,
English documents may contain translation inaccuracies or semantic deviations from the original Chinese texts.
The Chinese version remains the primary reference whenever ambiguity exists.