Catching the Light

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What is light? From the glories of heaven to the fires of hell, no question has so fascinated, so mystified, so captivated the human imagination through the centuries as the wondrous powers of light. Now, in this extraordinary and brilliant book, an experimental physicist invites us to take part in a dazzling and unforgettable quest - an inquiry into the fundamental nature of light in our history, our world, and our lives. A needle dropped on the floor may be in our field of vision but remain unseen. How - in a flash of recognition - do we perceive it? Consider the true story, set down here in compelling detail, of the man, blind from early infancy, whose eyes were surgically repaired and yet still could not see. Or the fact that the ancient Greeks lacked words for green and blue and Homer looked out on a "wine-dark" sea: What is the puzzling phenomenon of Greek color vision? And, even more puzzling, what does light look like if there is no object to reflect it? In tracing the history of light, Arthur Zajonc presents an intriguing and dramatic look at the evolution of knowledge and the development of the human mind itself. It is a journey that leads from the temples of ancient cultures to the experiences of modern mystics, from the artistic theories of the Renaissance masters to the luminous paintings of Kandinsky, from the scientific perspectives of Newton and Faraday to the revolutionary ideas of thinkers such as Einstein, Planck, and Bohr. With rare clarity and an unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of rainbow and candle, prism and mirror, as well as the paradoxes of quantum theory. He explores the vital connection between the outer light of nature and the inner light of the human spirit. And he challenges our intellect and our imagination to reach beyond ourselves, to shape new perceptions, and even to comprehend the divine. From biblical times to the world of modern optics, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis of history

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

To the ancient Egyptians, light was ``the sight of God.'' To quantum physicist Max Planck, light consisted of discrete particles or photons. How humanity has conceived of and responded to light is the subject of an intriguing investigation by Amherst physics professor Zajonc. In lyrical, precise prose, he argues that while Plato viewed the ``mind's eye'' as a form of cognition uniting inner and outer light, Newton and Faraday signaled a transition to a mechanistic conception of seeing and of light. Goethe's theory of color and light, rooted in the imagination, and Rudolf Steiner's metaphysics of light as angelic emanations brought ``a renaissance of the mythic,'' which Zajonc welcomes as he seeks to restore a spiritual dimension to our perception of light and of the world. Along the way he considers Kandinsky, linear perspective, a cultural history of rainbows, Zoroastrianism, Keats and Einstein. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Zajonc is an academic physicist who specializes in quantum physics, but his approach to the subject of light is somewhat unconventional from the perspective of many of his colleagues. He provides a capsule history of humans' changing understanding of the nature of light; scientific developments are interspersed with the comments of numerous philosophers, literary figures, and miscellaneous other non-scientists. In summary, he appears to argue that modern science has failed to supply us with a complete understanding of light and that we would be better off with an amalgam that incorporates spiritual and philosophical aspects as well as scientific models. His views are in part unorthodox but deserve a hearing. Recommended chiefly for academic libraries.-- Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor

Kirkus Reviews

Brilliant study of the relationship between two fields usually kept miles apart: the physics of light and the metaphysics of the mind. Zajonc (Physics/Amherst College) begins with the curious problem of why blind people usually see only a blur when they first recover their sight. The solution is that "without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind." Seeing requires light and understanding. This axiom has revolutionary consequences, for it suggests that our very perception of the world is malleable: If we could see with greater consciousness, we would see—and thus inhabit—a richer cosmos. Zajonc traces this concept as it appears in mythology, science, literature, painting, and the history of ideas from Plato to Einstein. The ancient Greeks, he argues convincingly, did not perceive colors as we do; green was seen as "moist freshness" (e.g., blood was "green"), while blue was seen as "darkness." Why? Because the "antique imagination" differed from ours; perception has evolved through history—and so, too, has our comprehension of light. Euclid saw light geometrically; Robert Grosseteste imagined all matter as condensed light; Newton established optics as a mechanical science; in Planck's quantum mechanics, light maintains its mystery as "a single thing with the universe inside." Zajonc seems equally at ease discoursing on atoms or angels, Zoroaster or relativity. He does so without fudging the science or fuzzing the spirituality, by seeing religion and science as essentially one enterprise, that of "seeing the invisible in the visible." His two masters seem to be Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, both of whom held that, as Zajonc puts it, "itis ourself whom we study in studying light." As our consciousness evolves, new perceptions beckon; in time, we may see that "the natural world around us grows out of the moral world within us." A beautifully composed meditation that sheds new light on the nature of nature itself.