Richard Collins: Bats born with innate sense of speed of sound

Bats live in a time-dominated world quite unlike our spatially organised one.

If the sun exploded, it would take eight minutes for us to discover the catastrophe. Sightings of the moon are over a second out of date, while the light arriving today from Betelgeuse started its journey during the Hundred Years War. There is no universal ‘now’; we live in ‘the extended present’. Nor are we in space, but in ‘space time’.

Time delays affect all visual perceptions, but they are so infinitesimally small in everyday life as to be undetectable.