' The Reality Bubble grabs your metaphoric lapels and rattles your mental cage. Prepare to have your bubble well and truly burst.' It’s an incredibly illuminating and challenging but ultimately empowering book, and reading it delivers a shock almost on the level as when Neo took the red pill in The Matrix. 'Ziya Tong is a wonderfully erudite companion on a tour of reality, from the very smallest to the size of the universe and everything in between. It is a unique and urgent work of non-fiction that promises to open our eyes, expand our view of the world, and disrupt hardened ideas, allowing us to question what surrounds us, what sustains us, and perhaps most importantly, what controls us.

How else do we explain the troubling finding that one in three children believe that cheese comes from plants? Sadly, a similar percentage of children don’t realize that eggs come from chickens and even more young people are unaware that cows produce milk.īlending captivating science and entertaining ideas, The Reality Bubble is best described as a cross between The Matrix and the science series Cosmos. As Tong explains, we live in a bubble, oblivious to the workings of the real world that are conveniently hidden from plain sight. In this profound and compelling narrative that challenges our basic assumptions about the world, Tong, a former Discovery Channel anchor and PBS host, shows us how a multitude of blind spots, some innate and some learned, distort our perception of reality and endanger our very survival. From the synthetic production of our food and the fabrication of our borders to the microscopic creatures that control our life support systems, most of the world operates outside our field of view. That stark reality is more critical than ever today, as the natural order of our planet is under relentless assault by the human beings that inhabit it. To put it more bluntly, we often don’t see what’s right in front of us. Mariotte’s discovery of the human blind spot is an important reminder that we don’t always have a complete picture of our surroundings. In the late 1600s, French physicist Edme Mariotte discovered a quirk of human anatomy that is familiar to anyone who drives a car: the blind spot.

The reality bubble