User:Quercus solaris/Converting the energy of light to an electric signal

It's obvious that image sensors and photoreceptor cells both perform transduction, and that the former are artificial transducers whereas the latter are natural (biological) ones. Specifically, they both convert the energy of light to electric signals, which serve as input to a computer or a nervous system, respectively. After all, that's what puts the photo- and the transduction in visual phototransduction. Which is, of course, one form of physiologic transduction.

The trouble is that I haven't found a good reference to cite yet, and when I added the information to the article on image sensors, it was reverted pending a reference. Can you find one? I did not spend a lot of time on it yet, so maybe there's one out there to be found with the right search terms. If you have one to suggest, please feel free to paste it into this page.

I do need to point out here that anyone who can't see the WP:BLUE shade infused throughout the first paragraph above—that is, anyone who has to peer suspiciously at the words "it's obvious" there because they aren't capable of seeing the obviousness themselves—is more or less cognitively impaired, overly ignorant, or both. Nonetheless, one cannot win any argument with them about the necessity of a reference citation, because the abstract principle behind WP:VERIFY can't allow exceptions in which lots of people are too blind to see the obviousness; to allow such exceptions would open the flood gates to subjectivity. Thus the only instances that are recognized as meeting WP:BLUE's high threshold are the ones that every idiot can verify and that no idiot can even begin to credibly argue against (the cardinal and nominal example, being, of course, the default blueness of the sky on our planet). Which is to say, in other words, that the setting of the epistemologic threshold is dependent on the ambient stupidity and the ambient ignorance, somewhat like the calibration of image sensor thresholds is dependent on the ambient lighting. However, for someone who is not blinded by ignorance, it is still obvious that WP:BLUE inevitably, factively applies to this instance (the phototransduction passage), even though one is not allowed to say that it does. (In other words, it is an instance of the class of things that are true but you are not allowed to say that they are true.)

See also OBI in connection with this line of thought. Of course one must also duly recognize that even OBI occasionally gets things wrong, too (and yes, it creates messes when that happens, and they are messes that take decades to clean up). But the obvious problem with viewing a pedantically extremist form of WP:VERIFY as some sort of magical talisman that can prevent those occurrences is that it is (obviously, logically, inherently) incapable of doing so, at the same time that it also tramples the (obvious, logical, inherent) sanity of WP:BLUE under a stampede of misguided stomping. (It is logically incapable because there is no amount of citing WP:RSs that can disabuse any particular instance of OBI getting something wrong until the day when the refutations of the incorporated notion are themselves published in WP:RSs, but no sooner.) Corollary: It is sometimes (unintentionally) comical to see the bits of critical thinking, the logical connections, that one isn't allowed to mention in a Wikipedia article because there's always someone else to come along who's too obtuse to see their logically factual nature and who thus misapprehends that they are "research", opinion, tendentious, insufficiently relevant, boringly long (especially if more than 5 words), or even incomprehensible. In fact, in some instances, one can sometimes even clearly see, if one understands what one is looking at, occasions when people sometimes guard Wikipedia against containing logical insights (as opposed to laundry lists of trivia points, which they tend to love) so that they can keep Wikipedia's content from exposing their own incompetence, in a certain way, or so that the limits of Wikipedia's content reflect the limits of their own competence. They cannot abide a Wikipedia that understands or explains some particular aspects of reality better than they do, because it wounds their self-esteem or their ego. Now, they can't get away with degrading it in articles on technical subjects such as aspects of advanced mathematics, physics, or chemistry, where they can't get away with deleting Wikipedia's exposition of those topics merely because it happens to be over their heads, as such trampling would be duly reverted, with prejudice, and rightfully so, for obvious reasons (which if you need explained to you, you might as well just stop reading this passage); but then they don't need to (fight those instances), either, because it's no embarrassment for them (or anyone) to have to admit that "I just don't have competence in that particular area, but that's OK, as neither do most of you, and we're all still valuable members of society nonetheless, because knowing about that topic is optional for most people." But the situation is different when it comes to critical thinking at the 101 levels of life. In those contexts one sees the fear and loathing emerge from the woodwork to keep Wikipedia from eclipsing someone's ignorance, lest they lose face in a certain way and have their ego bruised. It reminds me of nothing so much as the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the man behind the curtain is revealed as such and quickly and angrily hollers for everyone to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, with the implication that if you pay any attention to the man behind the curtain, you're an idiot, or inferior, or small — not that the man behind the curtain is. That's the petulant tone with which such deletions tend to be made. Like a squid squirting ink—"Just who is the idiot in this situation?? Guess we'll never know because of all the ink I just squirted, all the water I just muddied — but I bet it was you, not me, right?! Don't look [at me]! You're the one who [allegedly] violated WP:VERIFY! I'm smart! You're crap! Leave me alone! I'm great! Don't try to counterargue against this censoring, though!"

Granted, the progression of the line of thought above progressed to the most extreme instances, whereas the instance that prompted the start of the line of thought was no such belligerent instance at all; rather, it was merely an instance where someone calmly deleted a fact because they didn't realize that they were deleting a demonstrable and easily rederivable fact rather than an opinion or a piece of (as they imagined) "research". Below is the latest iteration of the section that was removed:

Comparison with biological phototransduction

The production of a small current when a material is excited by radiation is the same principle by which vision systems work in human and animal eyes. Thus artificial imaging sensors using scintillation (making use of luminescence, such as fluorescence) are analogous to the natural photoreceptor cells that provide visual phototransduction, although the tactics (such as protein unfolding and refolding versus fluorescence) may differ. The important difference is that a much wider portion of the spectrum can be detected by artificial sensors. Whereas the latter cover every wavelength of the spectrum (from radio waves to gamma rays), biological photoreceptor cells cover only from near-infrared to ultraviolet (and in humans only red to violet).