CATCHING THE LIGHT – The entwined history of
light and mind
Arthur Zajonc
Professor Zajonc, a physicist, sets out on a journey
of discovery, to answer What is Light?
He does not simply employ physics but also poetry, philosophy and art. On the
way, we encounter: the ancient Greeks, who apparently had no words for green
and blue; India’s Bhagavad-Gita featuring a bard who sings to a blind and
worldly royalty; the Arab Alhazen’s improvement on Euclid, supposing ‘the eye,
once the site of a sun-like, divine fire, fast became a darkened chamber,
awaiting an external force to lighten it.’; and Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes,
Goethe, Milton , Twain, Galileo, and Einstein to name but a few. The duality
of lights, as both a wave and a particle (as I recall from my Open University
course) is echoed in Zajonc’s theme, the duality of the two sides of the brain
interpreting the artistic and the mathematical views of light, and is explained
clearly and insightfully, with Zajonc mustering some quite poetic prose in the
process.
Illustrations are not complex and kept to a minimum;
this is not a text-book, more a detective adventure story.
Arthur Zajonc
Kepler
The dangers of scientists reducing everything,
including beauty, to cold passionless data was long-ago appreciated by many ‘natural
philosophers’ such as Faraday and poets like Keats, and every effort was made
to retain a sense of wonder at the new discoveries; even the late Richard
Feynman said that his appreciation of the beauty of nature was enhanced, not
diminished, by his knowledge of physics.
This, then, is a celebration of Light,
and of our tentative, often frustrated, fumbling in the dark for that
understanding. Light is as much a part of our mind-set as it is an external
phenomena. For example, Zajonc cites a patient blind from the age of ten months
receiving cornea transplants when he was fifty; when his sight was restored he
could not see as his brain had not learned to see: the process of learning was
slow and never fully completed.
Published in 1995.
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