Light In The Shade

'In the beginning, there was light...'

Hello everyone

Before my erstwhile publisher thinks I've been treating my editorials rather too heavily of late, I thought it might be worthwhile doing something of a more light nature.

So this month, we're going to look at light...so to speak. I mean. You see light every day. If you're blind and somehow reading this through some exotic computer hardware, then apart from admiring your technology, this isn't meant to be offensive.

What you can't see, you can feel. That is, you can tell the difference between sunlight and lamplight by the level of its heat and know how it affects your circadian way of life in when to be awake and when to sleep.

This effect is felt by practically all of living things on this planet with the exception of deep-sea-life. The same will no doubt apply to the inhabitants of any alien world and the star they orbit. It's just one of those universal things.

If ever there was a common denominator between us and extra-terrestrial life it would be a preference for sunlight. Light is there for us all. The plants use it as an energy source to grow although they do most of the work during the night.

Outside of suntans, it provides a natural source of light and warmth for all organic life. Without light it would be very difficult to see anything. In some form or other, we have a dependence on natural light. Is it any wonder that we associate light with good and the absence of light with bad or evil?

Darkness tends to scare us at an innate level. To some extent, that isn't too far from the truth. Primitive man must have feared the dark as they became easy prey for quiet nocturnal predators. An absence of light isn't perfect. Light reflected from the moon during its cycle offered some visibility.

Early man must have been very relieved when the moon returned in its cycle. On a bigger scale. Light is what makes the universe go around. It's one of the nearly consistent constants around. 186,282 miles a second or 299,793 km a second in the vacuum of space. It's not totally perfect.

A beam of light will bend in a gravity field and lose a little velocity but not enough to be significant. This shouldn't surprise us that much. On Earth, by using a prism, light can be split into seven colours. It also bends when passing through a liquid medium. It's easy to make light change direction or block it but rather difficult to destroy.

The nature of light, depending on how you look at it, is either corpuscular or radiation. As radiation, light reaches from high to low frequencies. We can only see one small part of its electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is only one aspect of this energy wave.

Using its microwave radiation, it's a quick way to cook food. At higher frequencies, it is the basic for radio transmissions. Directed in a coherent fashion and we have lasers. In recent years, light is now being used for transmitting telephone messages as well as in storage mediums like CDs &DVDs.

It's seen as the breakthrough technology although it's only using something that has been here since the Big Bang. It's even more universal than water as it isn't confined to any particular planet. Light is good. Rarely bad...unless you get sunburnt. Even better, it's cheap.

The Sun, our local star, will keep providing light and heat for several million years before showing it's worse colours and then it's good-bye world as it expands into a red giant. If there's any inhabitants on Earth when that happens, there will be 8 minutes grace before evaporation.

Hopefully, by then, Mankind will have moved out into the galaxy as a means of self-preservation as much as anything. No doubt our descendants will look back at Sol, our sun, and remember there are times when light isn't so benevolent.

Will it spawn malevolent myths or will we confine the boogieman to darkness? After writing the first draft of this editorial, I stepped back and had some further thought on this subject. Actually, it was more to do with the paragraph above. The universe was created in an explosion that must have yielded a great deal of light.

When our Sun eventually expands as a red giant, then we or our multi-generation away offspring are also likely to die in light. Maybe our age old appreciation of light isn't perhaps as wholesome as one might suppose. Light isn't good or bad. It's just there. The same can be said for dark. It's just there. Like the Ancients who personify the elements as gods, maybe we're also making a bad judgement call here by defining light as good and dark as evil.

Maybe we're letting our imaginations run away from us here? Maybe the absence of one final flash of light will one day be the only difference between knowing we're alive or dead? Perhaps darkness has been given bad press over the years? We live in light. We live in darkness. We need equal measures of both for a balanced life cycle.

To malign one side of our lives seems folly. Well, at least until someone can prove to me that all the 'dark matter' in the universe isn't out to get me.

Thank you and good night.

Geoff Willmetts
editor: SFCrowsnest.com

PS: Do you ever wonder why Toby McGuire as Peter Parker in the new 'Spider-Man' movie isn't wearing glasses as his comicbook counterpart did? Maybe it's because he would have looked like an older version of Harry Potter sans the scar on his forehead. As to the original Peter Parker, I did speculate once upon a time that his Spidey mask reflective eyeglasses were probably prescription although it must have looked odd when he ordered up from his optician.

PPS: My re-organising is working out and I'm working my way through the samples. It's taking time but I think I'm in the process of catching up. If you have moved your book elsewhere, then tell me and let me take it out of my pile for those with more patience.

Hologram Tales e-mail: gfwillmetts@REMOVE.FOR.SPAMhotmail.com
terrestrial address:
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BRIDGWATER, Somerset TA6 6EA, UK.
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