Prismatic Light

Day 123: Held up in my father's arms so that I could observe the full moon, I spoke my first word: "Light!" Not "mama" or "dada," mind you, but "Light!" in a revelation of my first leanings toward science. From that moment on, I was fascinated by the phenomenon. As a young child, I played with mirrors, facing them into themselves, trying to get my eyes into a position where I could see around the bend of the infinite tunnel the reflections created. I was captivated by my father's spyglass and the way it brought far things nearer. When I reached elementary-school age, I was given a microscope by my favourite uncle, opening yet another door into a realm I could not otherwise see. However, it was some time later before they discovered that the world visible through my eyes was nothing more than a smear, and at last I was fitted with glasses which gave me the ability to see almost normally. But in the back of my mind was always the question: Do I see what other people see? This of course is a variation on the old "Does steak taste the same to you as it does to me?" puzzle. The fact is, we have no way of knowing how another person perceives sensory input. We can make educated guesses, and we assume that most people share these experiences in the same way, but we don't really know, not really. (Frankly, I don't like steak, so it must not taste the same to me as it does to you.) In any event, I began gathering optics of all sorts for my amusement: magnifiers, lenses, prisms, etc., and to this day, they intrigue me. For example, why does a mirror reflect the distance as a blur to a person who is nearsighted? It is a flat surface like a sheet of paper, but light does not "print" on it like a billboard. There's some fancy physics going on there, and yes, I understand it, although one part of my mind still insists it shouldn't work that way. And light behaves as both particle and wave. Which is it, because it can't be both? And is it really drawn by gravity? Is there some other force at play, something which we lack the mental ability to conceptualize? I imagine right now you're asking, "What got her off on this tangent today?" It was just a rainbow, a simple shattering of white light through the corner of my sprouter tray: ephemeral, intense and beautiful where it lay for a moment on my kitchen counter.