Einstein was allegedly obsessed with light. I remember this, because I watched some random documentary about him when I was like ten and this detail has never left my brain.

This recollection kept circulating through my thoughts, yesterday, as I sat through an astronomy lab about the way light interacts with matter. We squinted at rainbows for two hours, through ancient lab equipment. We played around with convex lenses and concave mirrors. We played with light.

Six feet apart, wearing masks across our faces… it all still felt hushed and hurried and tense.

The study of light is not the first thing that I would’ve thought of, when thinking about the study of planets and solar systems and galaxies. But maybe it should’ve been.

On some clear night, after darkness settles… look up.

What do you see?

Stars, you might answer. As many stars as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the entire fucking world.

Here’s the thing. The only reason that we know the stars exist at all is because of their light. Their light, which has literally traveled as fast as anything in the universe can travel, through empty space, sometimes for longer than there has been life on earth. Those same photons brush tiny mechanisms housed within our eyes, which sends a signal to our brains. Those same photons. That same light.

And that’s how we know the stars exist. That’s how we know the universe is there. Because of the way that light moves and interacts with everything it encounters.

One day I will fucking put this shit in book. I’ll wrap it up inside a story.

I just think that should be a thing.

I don’t understand why people think religion and science can’t coexist. I don’t care if all of this just randomly fucking happened, unfolded on the basis of dry chance. If I was going to worship anything, it would probably be this. Because it’s fucking beautiful.

So we have to understand how light works, because that’s where almost all of our information about the universe comes from. We have to be able to build models and predictions, interpret data, to get at the nature of things.

And it’s more than just the light we can see. There’s an entire electromagnetic spectrum available to us, stretching from gamma rays to radio waves, from ultraviolet to infrared. And it’s all up there, even if we can’t see it.

Sometimes, with the right tools, we can.

Not the same thing, but Galileo used two concave lenses to discover Jupiter’s moons. So there’s something.

I used two concave lenses to make a smiley face on a whiteboard appear slightly closer to me, and also upside down.

Within the spectrum of visible light, different wavelengths correspond with different colors. Squinting at a tube full of helium gas, through a tiny lense in an awkwardly heavy device, we could see the full spectrum, each wavelength fading into the next so you couldn’t quite tell where one color ended and another began.

I’m not entirely sure that I passed this lab.

The equipment was kind of terrible, even if it did let me see things i wouldn’t usually be able to see. Or maybe I just had a hard time understanding how to use it. Maybe it was both. It was hard to focus and keep track of all the information and it was late and I was tired and I still haven’t really learned how to ask for help when I don’t know what’s going on.

So I fudged my way through it. By the end of two hours, it was very not perfect, incomplete in some places, messy and generally terrible.

I felt horrible.

Horrible for not being good enough to do well, in something that I thought was so wonderful. I think that’s part of why I was sad.

And somehow it mattered, next to the stars.

Fuck it, at least there were rainbows.

I hope it’s a good Wednesday. Some of these nights, look up. 🌙