The Meaning of Light

By Roy D. Follendore III

December 25, 2002

It just now became Christmas and on this night 2000 years ago it is thought by some astronomers at a star was seen that went supernova and exploded. Today the light from the stars that arrive in the Hubble telescope often have taken billions years for its light to approach our planet earth. Some of those beautiful stars existed once and are no more.

Like the three Maji, you too might find that one particular distant sun that you desire to observe on this night. Stars that are a significant distance away in the Universe from Earth can be observed with the naked eye when they go supernova. A single photon of that light may have taken as much as a billion light years to arrive. Once it arrives it only takes an instant to be absorbed by your eye. In retrospect it almost seems that the light was somehow meant to be absorbed by your retina and transformed into information to reach your mind as perception.

There are wonders about light that mankind shall probably never know with absolute certainty.

How did that light know when it left that star exactly which direction it should go? How did it know that your eye and mind would exist once it arrived? Does most light travel without observation?

You only see the light from the star that arrives in your eye at 670,000,000 mph, as you rotate on the earth at 1,040 mph miles an hour, as the Earth rotates around our Sun at 67,000 mph, as our star rotates around our galaxy at 560,000 mph, as our galaxy moves toward our neighbor galaxies at 90,000 mph, and as our local group of galaxies move at 1,400,000 mph.

Each moment the human race is bathed by your chosen stars times a billion, billion times and more. Together, all of the rays have been traveling a billion, billion, billion and more time to reach us, far longer than this universe has existed or will exist. The light you may see from that star now had all but arrived when we human kind were still single cells. On that cosmic scale, the light was virtually in your eye by the time the human race built the pyramids and the Star of Bethlehem was first seen. Only an instant later in lights perspective, you came to be born, saw the light and in less than an instant, all of the people you know shall be dust.

If the next star were to blossom now, by the time its light reaches where we are now, the human race will probably have vanished, our planet may be preparing to be enveloped within the preparations of our own supernova explosion that is the fate of our star. Perhaps billion years or more from now we shall have been transformed so that the light from our Sun may arrive in the eyes of others who will wonder at this magnificent universe of space-time through which we all exist together. The vast majority of light is forever traveling and will never arrive at any destination before the end of time. It permeates the empty dimensions of space. Light as a whole is therefore the elusive waves of dark matter and energy that shall never be detected. We only know from inference that such light must exist.

You might say that it is a matter of scientific faith.

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