Last week, I argued that vision is the most important human sense in part because light is the most efficient way to transmit information in the universe. That's why you hear cable providers talking about fiber so much these days.
No, Verizon's not trying to give you supplements to regulate your digestive system.
In this case, fiber refers to fiber optics: thin, flexible glass tubes that replace traditional wires and carry light from point A to point B. Because photons (the particles that transmit light) can carry much more information than electrical signals, fiber optics allow us to send and receive information faster than ever.
Translation: you can now literally send memes at the speed of light.
What a time to be alive.
Since we're talking about using light to transfer information again, I want to go into a little more detail about what that means, and why it matters. I know it sounds science-y and intimidating, but don't worry - I've come up with a way to make it easy to understand.
We're going to make a completely original reality TV show to demonstrate how sending messages and information with light works.
Here's the run-down.
The Good, the Bad, and the Chad
Originally, I had planned to pick one devilishly handsome engineer (probably a 20-something year old Indian guy from Brooklyn, to keep the key demographics happy) and 25 well-educated, age-appropriate, emotionally sensitive women that were very much attracted to him as the show's cast.
Our lovable nerd would get to know these women on a series of dates each week, and find true love by narrowing down the cast until he found the woman he liked best.
Again, I'd like to reiterate that this show is 100% original and NOT a rip-off of a 20+ season ABC series.
Unfortunately, while I knew just the right guy for the show, I couldn't even find even one woman in the greater NYC area that met that description (and I've triiiiied. Mom please just arrange something already).
So I scrapped that idea and just got 25 of the weirdest girls I could find, and some dude named Chad.
I found him vaping in an ironic t-shirt at the gym. Imagine that.
All Chad would have to do is choose which girls he wanted to keep seeing, and eliminate some of the girls he didn't like as much. But there was a serious problem - Chad was terrible at communicating his feelings.
So how would he tell the girls who should stay and who should go?
Roses are Red, Lasers are Redder
This is when I came up with a brilliant, totally original solution. Instead of handling the situation like mature adults and having the cast talk it out, we would have a dramatic weekly ceremony in which Chad would use a visual signal to communicate his feelings to the girls he liked best.
Functionally, it would be the same as sending a written or verbal message, but instead of using written or spoken words, he'd use an object or simple visual cue to tell each girl to stay or go.
If a girl received the message, she would stay, and if she didn't get one, she was out. Real simple stuff.
Now for the big question though - what should this visual signal be?
In a flash of inspiration, it came to me. Red roses. No one had done it before. It would be groundbreaking. I started preparing my acceptance speech for the inevitable primetime Emmy.
Unfortunately, roses are expensive, and this is when our budget ran out.
So instead, I gave Chad a sweet red laser pointer I found on the sidewalk and told him to just shine it into a girl's eyes if he liked them.
He said that was "dope" and that he'd done something similar in high school.
Top-notch stuff, Chad.
Love, Lasers, and Lawsuits
Before we start filming our pilot, let's take a quick look at how this whole laser pointer business works.
All a laser pointer does is shoot a high-powered beam of photons at the speed of light in one direction.
A quick note here - if the word "photon" is intimidating or confusing to you, just replace it in your head with "light". Talking about light is like discussing a stream of water, whereas talking about photons is like discussing the individual droplets in the stream. Just different ways to explain the same thing.
So shining a laser pointer at someone is pretty much the same as giving someone a rose, but instead of handing them one flower, you're throwing 16 quintillion flowers moving over 600 million miles per hour at their face.
Like I said, basically the same thing.
Anyway, these photons stop when they hit something, and if that something happens to be someone's eye, they'll see it and get the message!
Invariably, after this is all over, Chad and I will see some lawyers and OSHA compliance officers and get a slightly less positive message.
But we'll deal with that later. For now, Chad goes down the line, one by one, burning retinas and making dreams come true...for most of our contestants.
Of course there are the few unlucky ones - no photons for you, friends. They go home, while the girls that got the lovely red photons move on to the next week.
So that wraps up our pilot episode. In theory, the season will end several laser-ceremonies later, when Chad has finally narrowed his selection down to one debatably lucky girl with some undebatably serious vision problems.
Now this laser business might seem ridiculous and unnecessary. Chad could just as easily point, grunt, or dig into his trust fund and buy actual roses.
But what Chad is actually doing is sending very simple binary information - stay/go, yes/no, 1/0 - with just a few (quintillion) photons! From an engineering perspective, that alone is actually a pretty big deal, as it gives us a way to design really complicated things. Remember that the software on your computer or phone is just a fancy series of zeroes and ones, as is the entire internet, and your precious lightspeed memes.
I Love You to the Moon and Back
More importantly though, using photons actually gives Chad and I some cool options for the rest of the season, because as I keep saying, photons have other special properties we can use to carry more complex information.
While we were waiting for the network to greenlight the rest of the season, Chad sought counseling at my request and is much more in tune with his emotions. But these breakthroughs in therapy have been quite exhausting, and he says he needs some space.
So we decide to put Chad on the moon for the rest of the season. Because light is wicked fast and can travel through empty space, he can still send the exact same messages he did before, and they'll only take one extra second to get to our contestants.
He definitely couldn't do that by pointing, grunting, or handing out roses.
But there's a new problem. Chad has been so inspired by his recent progress in therapy that he's determined to articulate his emotions in as thorough a way possible, and our trusty red laser pointer indicating a simple yes/no isn't enough anymore.
Fortunately for him, photons come in a huge variety of colors, and we've sent him up with a veritable crayon box full of lasers. Now he can use a whole rainbow of photons to express his emotions.
This works for a few episodes, but Chad is truly a multifaceted man now. Even all the colors in the crayon box aren't enough to share his tumultuous inner condition.
As it happens though, there's not a whole lot to do on the moon, so Chad has started reading science and engineering books on his Kindle (Amazon please pay me now) in his spare time and has discovered time-varying signals.
Perhaps we underestimated you, Chad.
Using Morse code, he's now spelling out words by flashing different patterns over time. Combined with using different colored light, he's even created the universe's first two-dimensional alphabet.
In yet another few days, things have progressed even further.
We need to get Chad out of therapy and into rehab because our boy is hooked on photonics.
He's now using even more complex properties of light signals - phase-delays, polarization shifts, and dynamic pulse-width modulation to name just a few - to send increasingly complex messages to his potential soul mates on Earth.
We're not really sure what he's saying anymore, but we sure are proud of him.
Now we don't need to know any of the details behind these nerd words - but I hope that you'll believe me now when I say that there are many different properties of light that we can use to encode information and pass it from one place to another.
On Earth though, we've run into one final snag - the network didn't particularly care for the show, and we won't be filming any more episodes.
We just couldn't bring ourselves to tell Chad. So we'll just leave him up there, shooting lasers into the night. Maybe he'll find love out there, somewhere in the universe.
That marks the end of our heavy science for today - I promise this is going somewhere photography and art related. The key that connects it all is in how we receive the information light carries.
Remember, photons travel at the speed of light in one direction until they hit something. Once they get there, that's when the real magic happens.
An Eye for Detail
We've talked about it a lot, but we're finally going to take a look at it in today's picture: the human eye. The image below is a picture of my eye, shot by my coworker Doug Peterson on one of the cameras I work with daily, the Phase One IQ3 100MP. This might look pretty high resolution already, but clicking or tapping on the image will let you zoom to full size. This actually works really well on mobile too, so go on, and take a look around.
This image is pretty polarizing in that people either find it awesome and beautiful, or awesome and super gross. If you're among the latter half, just try and bear with me.
They're just eyes. They're beautiful.
I love macro images like this because up close, you begin to lose track of scale. Zoom in far enough and the edge of the pupil could be easily mistaken for an alien crater. Up close, you can even see the feathery texture and woven pattern of the iris, and the subtle folds of the circumferential band of deep brown melanin around the pupil.
Blood vessels look like tiny tendrils of scarlet ink suspended in solution, and the few eyelashes in focus look like solid steel rods.
Also yes, my skin was flaky as hell when this picture was taken. Sorry.
Our eyes do a lot more than just look pretty though.
When light enters through our pupils, it passes through a lens and forms an image on our retinas, where specialized light sensitive cells (called rods or cones) live. These cells contain special types of receptors not found anywhere else in the body, called opsins.
These opsins catch photons as they arrive and absorb their energy, beginning a process that ultimately informs your brain that you're seeing something.
But what happens to those photons?
They actually just disappear. You absorb them fully. They don't exist anymore.
To be 100% accurate, the photon energizes the opsin, causing it to vibrate and dissipate an astronomically small amount of heat, so energy is conserved.
But that photon is no longer aimlessly roaming the universe.
It's arrived at its final destination - you.
Soaking in Starlight
That disappearing photon has a lot of interesting consequences. It means that every time you see something, you're not just passively observing it - in fact, passive observation is impossible.
Observation is necessarily an active process because every time you see something, you're actually blotting a bunch of photons out of existence and turning them into brainwaves.
So when you look up at the night sky, you're not just looking at the universe, you're participating in it.
You're literally absorbing photons that were star-fuel, millions of years ago. That light travelled across the universe to ultimately become a part of you. And every time you look around, you're fundamentally changing the state of the universe.
That should make you feel special.
By capturing a photon, you've guaranteed that it will never go anywhere else in the universe. You are the only person in the universe that has ever, and will ever experience that moment.
Moreover, light is information - it tells you that there's something there. So in seeing and absorbing it, you now know something that no one else in the universe does. It might not translate to much more than the fact that that particular star existed in the moment the light you saw was created - but it's still a secret kept between you and the cosmos.
One final thing. You didn't just experience that moment - you were the reason it existed at all. If you hadn't been there to interact with that star, that moment would never have been consequential to the human race.
It would be just another beam of starlight shooting through space and falling to earth, never to be seen.
Sharing Art, Bridging Gaps
So remember, no one can ever experience a sight exactly as you did - that information is literally gone from the universe as soon as you see it or capture it with a camera. So even if you're seeing the same Empire State Building and taking the same selfie as millions of other people, those visions you have and moments you make are necessarily special and unique.
And even though those experiences can't be exactly replicated, we can use words, art, and other sorts of media to try and share that moment with others.
Photography is particularly good at this due to its similarity to human vision. It captures photons as we do, just through a slightly different chemical or electronic methods. And to me, another part of the beauty of photography is in its literalism and reprographic qualities. It even has a particularly poetic reciprocity by having light as both its direct input and direct output.
Producing art and sharing it can also be a collaborative experience that brings people together, across boundaries of all kinds - political, cultural, or generational.
On that note, I'll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of audio - a collaboration between father and son named "Delam," Persian for "my heart," by Hiatus.
It explores life and death, our rights and our wrongs, and our place in the universe.
Hiatus, AKA Cyrus Shahad, is the musician and producer, providing a soft, ambient backdrop over which his father, Bahram Shahad reads and translates several poems by the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi.
It may seem a tad pessimistic, but I think it suggests that there is beauty in living life in the moment, making the best of what we have, and trusting that our legacy will be based on the acts we performed for others, not what we achieved materially. Link, lyrics, and dubious Google auto-translated Persian below.
Yeah, I said, start.
He said:
سعدی مردی است که نام او خوب است و مفید بوده است
Where's my glasses, hold on. Ready?
سعدی مردی است که نام او خوب است و مفید بوده است
او هرگز نمی میرد فردی که "مرده" نامیده می شود شخص است
چه کسی آنها را در یک عمل خوب یا رفتار خوب ذکر نکرده است.
He says,
"Sa'di the man whose got good name and has been helpful,
he never dies. The person who is called ‘dead' is the person
who they don't mention him in a good deed or good behavior."
Another one he said:
مادر! گناهه زندگیام را به من ببخش.
زیرا اگر گناهه من این بود، از تو بود.
He said,
"Mother forgive me for sins of my life.
Because these sins which I've done is
mainly result of your work in the past."
هرگز نخواستم که تو را سرزنش کنم.
اما تو را به راستی از زدن چه سود?
I never wanted to blame you for anything.
But really what was the benefit of
producing me to the world? And to the life?
Then he says:
زندگی مانند یک توپ درهم از پشم است
که ابتدا از هیچ چیز شروع می شود و به هیچ چیز پایان نمی یابد.
He say, "life is like a tangled ball of wool,
which the beginning it starts from nothing, and ends to nothing."
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this episode, and on "Delam" as well. I hope it got you thinking, and gives you a stronger appreciation for the world and your very important place in it.
Until next time - much love,
Arnab