{"id":7356,"date":"2022-12-17T00:33:10","date_gmt":"2022-12-17T00:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=7356"},"modified":"2023-05-12T02:22:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-12T02:22:50","slug":"the-substance-of-celeritas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/17\/the-substance-of-celeritas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Substance of Celeritas"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Substance of Celeritas<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Since earliest history, humans have sought to understand the nature of light; yet the more we learn, the less we comprehend. Is the search for truth fruitless, or even foolish?\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Raquel Sequeira<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In the beginning, God said, \u201cLet there be light!\u201d And there was light. <\/em><\/p>

But what<\/em> was light?<\/p>

Perhaps light is the source of all matter in the universe. Medieval philosopher Robert Grosseteste imagined the first pinprick of God\u2019s created light radiating out in all directions until it reached the limits of the universe, then rebounding back upon itself over and over, leaving thick substance in its wake like layers of paint. Though Grosseteste\u2019s De Luce<\/em><\/a> is certainly less numerical and more worshipful than modern cosmology, there are some striking similarities. The zig-zagging motion of light through chloroplasts, moreover, powers the formation of all organic matter.<\/p>

Perhaps light is the great alchemist, which does not form but trans<\/em>forms matter, as mud to gold. In Sonnet 33<\/a>, Shakespeare depicts the morning sun<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy\u2026<\/em><\/p>

In Sonnet 114<\/a>, he wonders if the eye\u2019s inner light has power<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To make of monsters and things indigest
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Creating every bad a perfect best
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 As fast as objects to his beams assemble?<\/em><\/p>

Though our eyes may not send out beams of light\u2014as Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed\u2014the art of photography uses light to beautify the most common things, sometimes by simply focusing our attention. While film photography involves a kind of chemical transformation, light can also perform \u201ctransmutation<\/a>,\u201d as the alchemists called it: at the right frequency, a ray of light can change the identity of an atomic nucleus.<\/p>

All this is what light does<\/em>. In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell translated the magic of electricity and magnetism into mathematical language and revealed a thrilling clue as to what light is<\/em>.<\/p>

If it should be found that the velocity of propagation of electromagnetic disturbances is the same as the velocity of light\u2026we shall have strong reasons for believing that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon\u2026 (A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Vol. II, 382)<\/em><\/p>

He\u2019s being coy\u2014this is exactly what he found, and he was right. Light travels at a constant speed of 186,000 miles per second, the same as the speed of an electromagnetic field in the form of a wave. Light is <\/em>electromagnetism.<\/p>

So, then, what is<\/em> electromagnetism? My dad says I asked him that question when I was four, crawling onto his lap as if asking for a bedtime story. For the next 16 years, I continued to ask it of one science teacher after another. The more I learned, however, the more the answers baffled me. On the one hand, light must be a wave: in the decades before Maxwell\u2019s discovery, various experiments<\/a> showed that beams of light diffract and interfere like ripples of water. Since waves have to move through a medium\u2014waves are, by definition, the oscillation of a medium\u2014the wave nature of light meant that there must be some universal medium, imperceptible but ubiquitous from the surface of earth to the edges of space. This \u201cluminiferous ether\u201d was not only essential for Maxwell\u2019s equating light and electromagnetic waves; it was how he believed an infinite Creator could shape and direct the finite material universe. [1] Yet after Maxwell\u2019s death, the ether hypothesis failed<\/a> over and over in increasingly precise experiments, making its existence less and less plausible. Even worse, further experiments at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century revealed cases<\/a> where light acts much more like particles than waves.<\/p>

Is light a wave or a particle? Both? Modern physics says it\u2019s neither, which seems worst of all. Contemporary physical theories of light like quantum optics<\/a> are pure math. These mathematical theories bridge the gap between wave and particle properties, but at the cost of intuitive comprehensibility. Light is now just numbers and that tiny little letter c<\/em>, celeritas<\/em>, the speed of light. A constant without content.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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There is beauty to me in the problem of light: in the absurd miracle of optical tweezers and in the duality of wave and particle properties that reflects the dual human and divine nature of Jesus.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I\u00a0had every confidence, when I looked up at my father\u2019s face and asked him about electromagnetism, that there would be an answer. Like Maxwell, I believed that fundamental reality would eventually be intelligible to me because, at bottom, it must be something. <\/em>We both believed in the substantiality of the ineffable. This might be the deepest desire of the human heart: that God would be sensible, in both senses of the word.<\/p>

Yet intuitive comprehensibility isn\u2019t so important to everyone. Many philosophers of science have comfortably dismissed the ideas that science aims at truth or that we should interpret scientific theories as literal descriptions of reality. If our current mathematical theory of light works, it works. Since our theory may well change, as it has in the past, we shouldn\u2019t ask what light is<\/em>. How much more so for God?<\/p>

Yet I do ask. I can\u2019t help asking. And I can\u2019t help feeling that everyone should <\/em>ask, even if I accept that we can never have certainty about the nature of light or God. (\u201cGod called the light day,\u201d but some argue that we should doubt<\/a> whether the sun will rise tomorrow.) How can someone not <\/em>ask why the mathematical function for light actually works, such that biochemists can use light\u2019s massless momentum to create \u201coptical tweezers<\/a>\u201d that move molecules around(!)? Contemporary philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen<\/a> has suggested that whether or not we care about what really is<\/em> may ultimately be a matter of subjective disposition. Van Fraassen echoes 19th<\/sup>-century pragmatist William James, who argued<\/a> that such dispositions or \u201ctemperaments\u201d are not only valid but unavoidable elements of what we believe to be true in metaphysics and especially religion.<\/p>

Perhaps all I have is my disposition to desire truth, to want to know what light is. Perhaps, as Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnet 114 seems to fear, this disposition leads to \u201cflattery in my seeing.\u201d The desire for beauty, rather than beauty in the world, makes the world look beautiful:<\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 For if it see the rud\u2019st or gentlest sight,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The most sweet favor or deform\u00e8d\u2019st creature,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Incapable of more, replete with you,
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 My most true mind thus maketh mine eye untrue.<\/em><\/p>

But whence does my disposition come?<\/p>

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The similitude of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as it were a shining star. This lamp is kindled from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would almost glow forth of itself though no fire touched it. Light upon light. Allah guides unto His light whom He will.
(Tr. Pickthal<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>

A friend of mine paraphrases this passage from the Qu\u2019ran as, \u201cGod guides us by beauty.\u201d There is beauty to me in the problem of light: in the absurd miracle of optical tweezers and in the duality of wave and particle properties that reflects the dual human and divine nature of Jesus. This beautiful unintelligibility (\u201cmystery,\u201d perhaps) does guides me\u2014not to truth, but to the desire for truth. I long to \u201cknow\u201d these mysteries in the Biblical sense, participating in rather than possessing them. My longing for truth is, at heart, a longing for relationship.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The same scripture that bears witness to the light bears witness to the darkness: to uncertainty, silence, and separation. The light himself experienced these things.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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But can I have a relationship with something as insubstantial as light, as transcendent as truth? If I can, it must be a relationship of trust at every instant, waiting in darkness for the light to reveal what I hope is really there. Yet the waiting is not wasted. Sitting with uncertainty and the heartsickness of \u201chope deferred\u201d\u2014especially in community during the season of Advent\u2014I grow less attached to the specific form that the Truth (\u201cWord\u201d) may take in flesh. I grow ready for wonder and transformation. When scientists began to entertain the possibility that particle and wave might not be mutually exclusive, that materiality need not be the limit of intelligibility, a new era of physics was born (for better and for worse). When God becomes a man\u2014born in squalor, dying in infamy, and coming back to life\u2014when Incarnation and Resurrection really happen here on earth and in time, nothing can ever be the same.<\/p>

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it. (John 1:5, KJV)<\/em><\/p>

What about those who see no beauty in light\u2019s mystery, who simply don\u2019t care whether there is truth beneath the scientific theories\u2014do I really think I am more enlightened than they? Do I dare to say, with Kierkegaard, that they are in despair and do not know it? What if I<\/em> am the one in darkness, mis<\/em>-guided by the flattering light of my own eyes?<\/p>

I have nothing to say to this except that the same scripture that bears witness to the light bears witness to the darkness: to uncertainty, silence, and separation. The light himself experienced these things. Though Jesus was and is and is forever \u201cthe radiance of the glory of God,\u201d like the unbroken continuity of a wave, he also experienced isolation from God, like an individual quantized particle. I cling to the hope that this unintelligible paradox, reverberating through nature and scripture, is true. And I wait for moments of incandescence.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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[1] Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy<\/em>, London: Athlone, 1998, 252. See also \u201cQuantum Field Theory<\/a>,\u201d Encyclopedia of Mathematics.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Raquel Sequeira<\/strong> lives in Cambridge, UK, where she is studying for an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science. She graduated from Yale College in 2021, where she majored in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and edited the Yale <\/em>Logos.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since earliest history, humans have sought to understand the nature of light; yet the more we learn, the less we comprehend. Is the search for truth fruitless, or even foolish? 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