Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 14

For several hundred years, we thought light was a wave, but in 1905, Albert Einstein found a little photon — a tiny bundle of light energy that’s always in motion. Like billiard balls. But then the physicist Niels Bohr said light is actually like “billiard balls” and “ocean waves” at the same time. It’s not either/or, but both/and. Like a Zen koan. But we experience just one at a time… and we’re never sure which it will be. John Wheeler, one of Bohr’s students, proposed that in the same way light can be a wave or a particle, our inner realms of consciousness — our minds — are connected to the outer world, the universe.

I look up at the stars and think: that light is so old! It takes years to reach us. And its speed never varies. Einstein went so far as to say we are separated from light by 299, 792,458 meters per second.³⁰

Edwin Hubble grew up in rural Missouri in the late 1800s, an avid reader of Jules Verne. He loved watching the stars, too, and eventually he discovered how to measure their brightness. He decided the Milky Way is just one galaxy in a firmament of galaxies and calculated it is 100,000 light years across. He said Andromeda is a million light years away. He helped us understand how it takes sunlight eight minutes to actually reach us. And in 1927 color helped him learn more about our expanding universe. Objects speeding away from us appear redder. He called it the “red shift.”

Our universe, physicists tell us, was born 13.7 billion years ago. Stored sunlight here on earth keeps us alive. Every year the sun creates blossoms but the seeds for those blossoms contain last year’s sun-forces. Everything builds from what has gone before. In fact, until we find alternatives to fossil fuels, we seem to have no choice other than to keep burning up the ancient sunshine folded into our earth.

Most of us could dredge up what we learned in freshman science and repeat by rote that the sun is a giant natural thermonuclear reactor that converts hydrogen to helium and gives off heat. Every now and then it flares.

But I’ve come to believe that our sun-star is so much more. It is our very life. It is liquid gold, perfumed ether. And, in a very mysterious way, we are “like” the sun. Goethe argued that if the eye were not sunlike itself, how could we see the sun? Planets, as they orbit their sun-stars, tug at the star, causing it to wobble. Earth pulls at the sun and the sun slightly wobbles. The more massive the planet and the closer it moves to its sun, the more the star wobbles. Scientists search for these wobbly stars and are discovering more and more solar-planet systems at the rate of about one every two weeks. That’s a great deal of light around us!

Sometimes, when I sit on our deck, I think “sun and star” thoughts. Rudolph Steiner said sun forces stream down on us in a wave of intellectual life in service to the Spirit. Christ was a “Sun Being.” He came to earth in the body of Jesus and has been connecting us to this Cosmic Intelligence ever since that incredible Golgotha event when, as a man, he died. And then he came back, but in a changed body — one that could walk through walls and teleport. He showed his disciples, and by extension, us, that we too are radiant. We each hold his Divine Christ-Spark within us now.

Steiner spoke of how the sun and the moon’s forces can be stored in the earth and then released. In fact, the shining light we generate on earth radiates out into the universe. Our radiance, he said, goes out a ways and then is reflected back to us. The fiery ball we see as the sun is, as initiates have suspected for centuries, actually a reflection of our energy.

In Solar, Ian McEwan describes sunlight as falling “on us in a constant stream, a sweet rain of sun. A single photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron and so electricity is born, as simple as that, right out of sunbeams… Less than an hour’s worth of all the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world’s needs for a year. A fraction of our hot deserts could power our civilization. No one can own sunlight and no one can prioritize or nationalize it. Soon everyone will harvest it, from rooftops, ship’s sails, from kids’ backpacks… some of the poorest countries in the world are solar-rich. We could help them by buying their megawatts.”³¹ What a wonderful alternate vision of the future.

Edward Tryon of Hunter College said back in 1973, the universe is “something which happens from time to time.” But does it “just happen”? David Hume, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, said, “God so loved the earth that He put the earth just right from the sun.” It’s true. The planet Venus, for instance, is far too close. If we lived there, we’d be burned to a crisp. And we’re suspended exactly “right” in the Milky Way about two-thirds from the center. Any closer and the radiation would be too intense. It sounds like the “Goldilocks Theory” — this porridge is too hot, this is too cold, but this is just right! None of this is pure happenstance. I like the analogy Hugh Ross, an astronomer, posed. If this universe were purely accidental, he said, it would be like a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard. No, there was and is a plan. And we’re right in the middle of it.

The physicist Freeman Dyson said, “It’s as if the universe knew we were coming.”³² It makes us wonder if new colors, then, also may “just happen” in this vastness of life. Or are they being planned in a universe hovering directly over our own?

All I really know about black holes is that matter somehow spills into them and they are enormously heavy. John Wheeler of Princeton coined the phrase back in 1967. But what I’ve recently learned is that inside every collapsed black hole lies the seed to a new expanding universe. Astronomers tell us that 73% of all matter and energy is “dark energy” or Lambda. Gravity was the first to spin off and hop across the universe. In a black hole, matter is torn down to its fundamental state — which, it turns out, is light. David Ian Cowan in Navigating the Collapse of Time says that right at the edge of the hole is an area called an “event horizon.” People have described this as “the point of no return.” Gravitational pull causes most of the light to disappear into the hole, but some doesn’t. It clings to that event horizon and creates a photon band that radiates out into the rest of the galaxy and this is where the “events” part no doubt comes in. In this galactic light of very high frequency — in the gamma range and beyond — higher octaves of creative light go on to… well, no one knows. But I’m guessing to create new universes as soon as a “Creative Word” is spoken. Something like “Let there be photon light!” All this is fairly new news. We’ve thought our planet has been feeling the influence of this photon band for about five hundred years. But no one knew this metaphysical, spiritual band of light actually existed until the 1960s. We live in a universe of expanding event horizons.

Christian Doppler experimented with the colors red and blue and applied them to the stars. Higher frequency light is bluer and is approaching the observer; redder stars, of lower frequency, are receding. Color allows astronomers to track our expanding heavens.

This universal light we enjoy comes down and lives in nature. I can think of no better description of how this happens than in Annie Dillard’s own “pilgrim” words: “Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw a backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power...”³³

To better understand this phenomenon I turn to Teilhard de Chardin’s prayerful words: “Far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of ourselves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you, my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that eternal milieu. Without duration or space, in which our cosmos emerges gradually into being and grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense. Everything is being; everywhere there is being and nothing but being… Radiant Word…”³⁴

It seems creation is back-going as well as on-going. Once we achieve this “light-dom” we will go on as Light-Beings to do further work in some universe we can only dream of right now. But the more we understand about light and color right now, in this lifetime, the more prepared we will be for that future way of being.

One day, we will see beyond all this into colors more magnificent than we can now even imagine. But until then, we can simply stand in them, absorb them, reflect them as best we are able, and live each day in complete awe of their majesty. And we can thank the dedicated people attributed here, for spending many waking hours pursuing their theories, measurements, and definitions. They’ve helped us to better understand light as well as the many colorful hues and values, regardless of how we perceive them. What we call colors, how we see them, use them, and reflect on them will follow in subsequent chapters.