Isn’t it fascinating that light is the only force in the universe that has time wrapped around its fingers? Time is nothing but a mere privilege to light, yet for humanity it has always represented an insatiable need that could never be bent to our will…well, at least not in the physical world. The human mind was the match that lit up the spark- stone carving, words, sentences, verses or chapters- the fire bloomed, like an ink in the fountain pen nib and brought literature to life.
Engraving on a feudal lens
Following the foundations laid down by ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians Euclid and Aristotle, Ibn Al-Haytham, by writing "Kitab al-Manazir" (Book of Optics) in the 10-11th century, identified correctly that light reflects of objects and enters our eyes. In his break-through experiment, camera obscura, he observed an inverted and reversed from left to right image, when he made light pass through a hole in a box. His experiments clarified the principles of vision and optics, which resulted in the firstly documented usage of lenses, for magnifying and correcting eye defects, in the late 13th century AD.
In parallel, if we steal one of those lenses for a moment (don’t worry, they won’t mind, they’re dead) and set our sights on the non-scientific past, we can notice from a mile, a striking contrast to physics. Theoretically, glasses should’ve granted people better sight, yet literature describes a pitiful “blindness” in the common men, to their simple, yet hellish ways
of life, a pitch dark box through which occasional light rays pass through. “Let us descend now into the blind world,” Began the Poet, pallid utterly; “I will be first, and thou shalt second be.” as Dante Alighieri stated in Divine Comedy, Inferno.
Born again in the cosmos
In the Renaissance, early 1600’s, the telescope made its first appearance to support our historic photoshoot. With it, scientists like Galileo Galilei brought the stars and planets closer to us. However, no matter in which angle we turned our “cone-shaped cameras”, celestial bodies kept posing out of focus. Half a century later, Isaac Newton’s discovery of white light breaking down into the color spectrum, offered him a broad perspective on its movement through prisms and glass. This helped him create the telescope that wears his name, which uses a mirror to shift and focus light instead of the usual lens. Once you see what you look like, all photos become fabulous, don’t they?
A century before Newton, the “to be or not to be” writing prodigy was born, William Shakespeare. He revolutionized, through his dramatic play, “Romeo and Juliet”, the idea that familiar, platonic or romantic love are as important to humanity as the thirst
for knowledge that scientists show.
Black and White
If on the subject of related fundamental scientists, let’s grab our universal trumpet together and perform a “reveille call”. Just imagine these famous figures marching into our article, Christiaan Huygens, who first mentioned that light could be a wave, Thomas Young, to whom interference and particle duality are accredited to, the Michelson-Morry duo, who proved though a 40 year old experiment, the constant and finite nature of the speed of light and last, but not least the one and only creator of the Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein.
The double slit experiment, done by Thomas Young, is composed of a barrier, with two linear holes and a wall behind it for the projection. A light is pointed at the wall and the observations made are that light behaves either like a particle or wave depending on how you look at it. Interference happens, when the two waves of light combine and either make themselves brighter or cancel each other and become dark, and that’s the reason why, instead of two lines, what will be seen on the wall is a zebra pattern.
This theme of duality is recurring in literature as well, the human mind being capable of perceiving multiple perspectives of reality and to create more. Robert Frosts’ modernist poem, “Fire and Ice”, which discusses the contrast between desire and avoidance, love and hatred, accepts them both, as they are in the eye of the beholder, they are relative.
Symbols are relative
What is remarkable is that not only abstract concepts like emotion, love and hatred are relative, but others in physics are too! Time is the best example for this. According to Einstein Special Theory of Relativity, the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers and the speed of light is the one and only lone wolf, doesn’t compose with any other.
This leads to the following consequence: the appearance of time dilation, on the basis which a theory called the Twin Paradox was conjured up. One twin, A, takes a rocket to space and the other, B, stays on Earth.
For A time will slow down more and more as he approaches the speed of light. Acceleration, a sudden stop and rocket turn-around, to return home, would change his inertial state, differing from B’s. The result would be a massive age difference between them, or even B no longer being alive.
Light, in this instance, can make us lose track of time and what our surroundings used to be, it’s a symbol of an uncanny, yet enticing bubble we’re encompassed in, in which reality bends like cigarette smoke around a flicking hand. French symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, by writing “Le bateau ivre”, the drunken boat, at the end of the 19th century, compared the universe with a turbulent flow of rivers and seas, describing existence as both stained and beautiful:
“(…)The green ooze spurting through my hull’s pine, / Washed me of vomit and the blue of wine,/Carried away my rudder and my anchor. Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,/ Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,/ Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached/ Flotsam, a drowned man in dream descends. (…)”
The queen and her dark horse
Literature entrances you to close your eyes and imagine every detail written. It is a medium for mental stimulation and can help us make associations. For example, close your eyes and imagine a scenario with me: before you stand a glorious queen, with a luminous cape and with a body of amber, in which are capsuled and still, like insects in sap, all the events past, present and future. Visible inside her, gallop two dark horses, slithering through the viscosity and finally exiting her body though the fingertips and eyes, back as one.
Too mystical? Let me explain: humanity's unique capability of seeing light from an outsider perspective and studying it as such will always be remarkable and venerated thanks to the brilliant minds of history and the inventions or hand work they used to bring them to life. No matter if you like literature, physics or something else, light can be felt everywhere and we each, as individuals, have the responsibility of being curious about it, learning from it and enjoying the benefits of the world today brought by her presence. So, what have you learned about light today?
Comments