Shedding light on an overlooked friend
Light is responsible for your visual perception of everything: the blueness of the sky, the glistening morning dewdrops on spider webs and the readability of words. Without light, we would be blind to all beauty, to all ugliness. 
It seems obvious, yet we hardly ever take the time to look at light itself, look not at the things it’s illuminating but at it, to appreciate it and say “Wow, it’s amazing.”
Well, this is my ode to light. The more I learn about light, the more I am awed by it. It is the opposite of your average love affair. Light is so genuinely mysterious that even experts on light fail to understand it. As a romantic, I am relentlessly drawn in by its elusive nature.
Light elucidates and enlightens, and at the same time it can make one feel very much in the dark. We tend to think that we, as humans, are an advanced and superior species. And yet, after all these years of scientific inquiry and method, we can’t harness light for solar power with anywhere near the efficiency that primitive marine algae do for photosynthesis.
A study published in Nature last week revealed that light works with algae in a seemingly supernatural way. Once captured, energy from a photon explores all the possible pathways to the alga’s reaction center and chooses the shortest route — all without losing any energy.
This phenomenon, termed quantum coherence, means the energy from the light exists in multiple places at once. Literally.
Gregory Scholes, leader of the study, uses this analogy: “You have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route.”
Light is unattainable, illogical and incomprehensible. Loving it is never dull. It has a tendency to misbehave — to do things for others that it will not do for us, and to be multiple, contradictory things at once — both a particle and a wave. It changes characteristics inexplicably in response to how you observe it and escapes into dimensions that are inaccessible to us.
Moreover, light is forever young. Every single photon that exists today is the exact same age it was at the moment of the Big Bang. Light hasn’t even aged a millisecond because nothing travels through spacetime faster than light. It is stuck in a perpetual present. Think of ascending a descending escalator at a pace that keeps you in a stationary location: Spacetime moves, but light moves just as fast in a metaphorically opposite direction — it is frozen because of its boundless permeation.
And yet, in spite of all these qualities that should make us jealous of light, it is impossible to cease admiring it.
Light can sometimes make us feel small and insignificant, as it enables the perception of all the distant stars in the sky. But at other times it makes us feel so enormous and important that we forgive its faults, and we realize our mutual dependence.
When light enters our eyes and interacts with the neurons in our occipital lobe, the vision center of our brain, something incredible happens — something arguably more incredible than quantum coherence — every imaginable color is captured, from dazzling gold to crystalline blue.
Without the interaction between light waves and our visual system, the world would be as colorless as a mathematical equation. This knowledge leads us to the realization that we, as humans capable of perception and appreciation, are really quite amazing too.
An analogy written by James W. Kalat in his neuroscience textbook, Biological Psychology, helped me see the light: If you were a piece of iron, how would you perceive a drop of water? You would have the experience of rust. From the perspective of iron, water is primarily “rustish.” But as a human, you know that rustishness is not a property of water at all. It occurs in iron when water interacts with it.
Similarly, color is a product of the reaction between light waves and our brain cells. Without this union, color would not exist — neither would beauty nor any other visual quality, except perhaps as dry potential.
The universe seems to have brought light into existence and orchestrated an evolution that allowed for something as complex and perfect as the mirror that is the eyeball — all so that it could look at itself.
You and light are better off together. The world, without your union, would not be beautiful.
Jean Guerrero is a senior majoring in print journalism. Her column “Scientastical” runs Mondays.