Oooh it’s a bull’s-eye! I was getting all sentimental with the twinkle in the eye and how even cows appreciate beauty… It’s a freaking pun 😂

Iv always loved the idea of animals enjoying beauty.

It’s 20 years for us, but for the photon, no time passes from being ejected from the photosphere to hitting the cow’s retina.

The Two-headed Calf

By Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

Fun fact: according to our models the photon doesn’t exactly travel in a straight line and hit the eye of the cow. It’s a probability wave that spreads out spherically across an astronomical range. It might as well “hit” Mars instead of the Earth. What actually happens is that the huge wave randomly interacts with the eye of the cow. At that time the probability collapses into a certainty (the photon), making it impossible for the wave to interact with anything elsewhere in the universe.

Edit: or if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation, the wave interacts with both Mars and the Earth. When the wave reaches the eye of the cow, a new series of waves ripple out. They contain the effects of a photon interaction, but the original (standing) wave before the interaction also remains. We can make a slice of the multiverse in which the cow’s brain perceives the photon, and another slice in which there was no interaction and the cow didn’t see it. Because of how consciousness is tied to a single chain of events, the cow as a matter of experience doesn’t both see and not see the photon. Rather it’s as if there are two separate experiences that exist independent of each other.