by Bob Berman
How does it work? A surgeon first implants a small silicon chip containing 150 electrodes on the retina. When the blind person puts on the system’s dark glasses, an integrated video camera sends images to a portable computer. A connected “pocket processor” converts that recording into an infrared image, which the glasses then beam into the eye. Pulses activate electrodes in the implant, and the optic nerve carries images to the brain. This wondrous concept has, as of this writing, been successful in its first medical applications.
In the spring of 2016 came the surprising announcement from Europe that even a basic property of light can have new, unexpected aspects. Specifically, light has an angular momentum, or rotational inertia, which science has exploited in various ways, including for the storage of quantum information. Viewed in the normal three-dimensional way, a photon’s angular momentum has a value that is expressed as a whole number, or integer, and is never fractional. But researchers have shown that when considered in some reduced dimensions, a photon’s momentum can have a fractional value, and no doubt this new finding will be exploited in future technological applications, such as coding methods that protect sensitive stored information. The point is, when the subject is light—seemingly so basic to reality—we are still not close to full understanding. Despite the quantum leaps of knowledge we’ve made since the days of Hendrik Lorentz, at the dawn of the twentieth century, light always seems to have new surprises for us.
As for spooky energies—dark energy and vacuum energy and zero-point energy—these large-scale facets of nature may also be fully present in our homes. As far as we know, their flux—their environmental intensity—doesn’t vary over the course of human lifetimes. Their effects on us are unknown but likely are minimal. Being ubiquitous, they are analogous to the oxygen and water vapor surrounding us. Logic dictates that anything that is everywhere in equal measure cannot be harmful to life forms occupying a finite position.
Even as our knowledge of these newly found ultrapowerful unseen energies increases, we don’t know whether they will be exploited in our lifetimes. At the moment we don’t know how we’d even take our first steps toward harnessing them. Still, the lure of an absolutely unlimited energy source keeps some of our greatest minds up at night. Throughout history, science has taught us to “never say never.” These energies could be invisible El Dorados of beneficence—fountains of limitless power and deliverers of vastly boosted living standards.
After all, the invisible light that has been discovered, studied, and harnessed has profoundly changed the way we live. We rely on the invisible parts of the spectrum for communication and food preparation. We rely on them to see the insides of our own bodies and to study the far reaches of outer space. Yes, the growing use of drones and Wi-Fi and other technologies has ramped up the flux of microwaves and radio waves in our homes. But the main takeaway from this book is certainly not that we should be fearful. Rather, my purpose has simply been to open a window onto the enormous universe of omnipresent energies, most of them benign, that fill every moment of our lives.
I hope the tales of their discoveries, the ways in which they changed civilization, and the ways in which they affect us today will do more than inspire us to salute the men and women who dedicated their lives to advancing this science and these technologies. Given that a world of unseen power and potential surrounds us—of which we have only scratched the surface—I also hope we will add a good measure of wisdom to our cleverness as we explore the unseen lights that blaze brilliantly in realms beyond what our senses can ever perceive.
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About the Author
BOB BERMAN, one of America’s top astronomy writers, contributed the popular “Night Watchman” column to Discover for seventeen years. He is currently a columnist for Astronomy, a host on the weekly Strange Universe show on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, and the astronomy editor of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. His books include Zoom and The Sun’s Heartbeat. He lives in Willow, New York.
SkyManBob.com
ALSO BY BOB BERMAN
Zoom
The Sun’s Heartbeat
Biocentrism (with Robert Lanza, MD)
Shooting for the Moon
Strange Universe
Cosmic Adventure
Secrets of the Night Sky
* My friend Matt Francis, an electron microscopist, is training his dog to recognize and respond to light displayed as a wave pattern on a screen as opposed to a series of particles. If he succeeds in teaching the dog to bark when observing waves and remain silent when observing only particles, he may be able to settle the matter and determine whether a dog’s consciousness can “collapse” a photon into its particle configuration. Yes, such issues actually obsess some of us.
* Light’s speed as an immutable constant brings bewilderment when students confront the concept of redshift and blueshift. Although each photon of light hits you at precisely the same speed whether you’re crashing into it head-on or racing away from it, your relative motion to light does cause its waves to either scrunch up or spread apart. Since all but a handful of galaxies are racing away from ours, the light from all their countless billions of stars is stretched out and redshifted, meaning that their light has been shifted out of the visible range entirely and into the invisible infrared range. We could only view them, as William Herschel so presciently suspected early in the nineteenth century, with an infrared detecting telescope as opposed to an optical one. And indeed, astronomers increasingly use infrared telescopes when studying galaxies.
* To learn how radiation affected the health of Hiroshima and Nakasaki survivors, see this report: http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/04/11/11greenwire-hiroshima -and-nagasaki-cast-long-shadows-over-99849.html?pagewanted=all.
* A black hole is a place of extreme density where gravity has become so strong that any object would need to move faster than light, which is impossible, in order to escape. Since light cannot escape, the object appears black. In practice, the only objects that can collapse to this degree are unusually massive stars in their old age, when their core hydrogen fuel has been so depleted that it can no longer supply enough outward-pushing energy to counterbalance the in-falling weight of the layers above it. In the heart of every galaxy are supermassive black holes, whose mass is not merely ten or twenty times that of our sun but millions or even billions of times larger. The relevance to our story is that nearby subatomic particles and atoms can be pulled into a super-high-speed orbit around both stellar and supermassive black holes to form a so-called accretion disk. Just before falling in and vanishing from our sight, such particles will be moving at such high speeds that they’ll be stimulated to emit high-energy bits of light, such as gamma rays.
* Hess, whose wife was Jewish, received threats from the Nazis, so he immigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Fordham University. He continued testing for radiation after Hiroshima—conducting measurements from the eighty-seventh floor of the Empire State Building, in New York City. He also measured the radioactivity of granite in New York’s 190th Street subway station and continued to contribute to the field of physics until his death, in 1964.
* The symbols were named for twentieth-century American psychologist Karl Zener, who used them in his experiments involving perception.
* If you want to make specific plans, the tracks of both events can be found at the NASA eclipse website: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html.
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