log entries of timotheus

I’ve known all about light ever since my first science text book. Everyone knows about light; what we see is the visible spectrum, colored things absorb certain wavelengths, bounces back other, etc. Pretty normal stuff that I thought was interesting, but minutely so.

That all changed last night.

I had taken a break from my Ergo Proxy watching; decided to read a little more of The Mother Tongue. I went out to the living room, flipped on the lights and plopped down on the couch. Once I got all situated, I kinda just sat there for a bit. Yes I’m a pretty exciting guy sometimes, sprawled out on the couch staring at a light.

It got me thinking about light in general. The more I thought about it, the more crazy the notion got. Before I knew it, an hour had gone by and I was feeling overwhelmed by it all. Here are some of the points I came across.

— Vision is just the ability to see echos of light. It is no more different than how bats see things by echos. Or radar. That is so stupid to me.

— Look at a lit room. Imagine these rays coming from the light source constantly, hitting all the walls and items continuously; it’s the reflection from that impact that we think of as ‘lit’ or ‘visible’.

— What if we ever ran across aliens who use light for communication? They would see our lights hung up everywhere like we’d see poles everywhere with speakers hooked up going ‘AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH’. They’d be like ‘WTF’. A computer monitor to them would be REALLY crazy.

— If the only way you could ‘see’ was by the ricochet of bullets, then a machine gun would be your flashlight.

— There is no difference between a light and dark room. Or daytime and night. Sometimes there are rays going through the area you can see the reflections of, sometimes there isn’t.

— Why is light necessary to ‘see’ your surroundings? It seems like double work, since there is already something flying around colliding off every surface in a room: lighter than air particles. I want to be able to see by the echos of air particles. Or maybe you can’t, since it happens so amazingly fast it paints all the surfaces of a room all at once, making it unintelligible ‘white noise’.

— Just as radiation waves hurt us, what if there are beings who are harmed or sickened by waves in the visible spectrum? Maybe a ‘fear of the dark’ is instilled in us from a long past battle with these spectrum-fearing monsters? Does this explain childrens fear of the dark?

Just the fact that what we take for granted as ‘vision’ is just the ability to see echos of light.. that seems crazy to me. I’ve known of the mechanics of light for a while now, but after last night I feel like I have a better awareness of the mechanics in action.

Still, it’s extensive thinking on points like these that, to me, sometimes puts into question my sanity. That and I talk to myself when I’m alone. I never ask questions though, more declarative statements, so I think that makes it ok… ?