[notes toward] The Encyclopedia of Light
All writing elides, to a greater or lesser degree, the way it came to be what you read. How many times did I start that last sentence? Five times. But four of them are no more. Had I penned those words in ink, however, scribbling away on a sheet of paper, traces of each false start would remain, and you would see my thinking in a way that, reading me now, you do not. Composition in digital media has, in this way, made for a special kind of frictionless world of sublated erasures, deleted deletions, and endless, invisible recompositions. In the affecting work of sensory history that follows, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first. We write, now, of course, with light, looking at glowing screens. But it is a strangeness of our monitors that we erase what we have written with still more light: a blinking cursor, backing over the words. What is Goethe supposed to have said upon his deathbed? Mehr Licht! More light! And he was erased. What follows, too, reaches for light — but the light will not be grasped.
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor
April 13, 2022
An anonymous observer in the Vaisheshika, India’s ancient school of Vedic philosophy, asserted in the sixth century BC that light and heat are “one substance” of two types: latent (seen) and manifest (felt). “Fire is both seen and felt. The heat of hot water is felt but not seen; moon shine is seen but not felt. The visual ray is neither seen nor felt.”
The centuries-long debate over light’s source—eye or object?—was settled by Moorish mathematician Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040). al-Haytham reasoned that, if it pains one’s eyes to behold the sun, then sunlight cannot possibly originate in the eyes, and must therefore be imparted by the object of vision itself. He conducted his research in the near-darkness of a mausoleum near Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque…
Early evening. Between the suspension cables flickering past the train window, a satin-soft purple glow. I make a point to look out of the window when crossing the bridge. To see so many lives through one pane reminds me that my reality is just one of an uncountable many. Often this thought saddens me, but today it comes as a relief.
The cyanometer (/saɪ əˈnɒm ɪ tər/) is an instrument for measuring “blueness” attributed to naturalists and explorers Alexander Humboldt and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. The device comprises squares of paper dyed in graduated shades of blue which can be held up and compared to the color of the sky. De Saussure's cyanometer had 53 sections…
In one work, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) schematized the constituent wavelengths of white light by matching each spectral color to a range of frequencies on the musical scale: purple (G-a), indigo (a-b flat), blue (b flat-c), green (c-d), yellow (d-e), orange (e-f) and red (f-g). According to Newton’s device, any visible wavelength has its corresponding musical tone…
In his Theory of Colors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) asserted that each of light’s spectral colors were naturally generative of a particular mood. Yellow produces “a serene, gay, softly exciting character”; blue, “a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose…” In Goethe’s view, to every quality of light there corresponds a distinct emotional temperament…
I imagine sometimes, that when the ocean has swallowed the coasts and the forests have burned, I will look up to find a lavender glow hanging above me, and recall having seen this very same light before, and when it was, and where, and permit myself the comforting, if fleeting notion, that maybe not so much has changed.
Radiative forcing is the variation in the energy flux of the atmosphere resulting from the interaction of sunlight, the earth’s surface and natural and anthropogenic particulates… Estimates suggest that the total amount of solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases since 1998 is equivalent to more than 3.1 billion of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima…
Inspired by the deep blue glaciers of the western Alps, John Tyndall set out to understand the relationship between aerosols and the mystifying blueness of the sky. His experiments filling a glass cylinder with mixtures of various gases, including carbon dioxide, benzene and butyl nitrite, and illuminating them with a beam of light, produced a variety of celestial blue clouds. The result of his experiment, he wrote, “rivals, if it does not transcend, that of the deepest and purest Italian sky.”
Tyndall’s colleague, philosopher John Ruskin, praised Tyndall’s creating “within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself.” Yet on the same day Ruskin wrote in a letter to a friend: “I’ll thank them—the men of science—and so will a wiser future world—if they’ll return to old magic—and let the sky out of the bottle again, and cork the devil in…”
Past midnight. Rather than going back to sleep, I open the sliding door, step onto the terrace and gasp. The cold is unexpected, almost inconceivable. The city is a dull sodium-orange smolder against the low dark clouds. I can look for only so long. Back in bed, I warm my stiff fingers between my thighs and feel my heart hammering against my ribs. Eventually, I cannot help but laugh at my body’s alarm. As if this were the first time I had felt the cold.
The proposed operation would spray calcium carbonate (CaCO3) aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Models suggest that these particulates would change the color of blue skies to a cloudy white. Beyond that, however, the project’s directors concede that they cannot predict what effects this solar geo-engineering would have on the earth’s climate…
Peter Schmidt is a writer, researcher and founding member of the Global Experimental Historiography Collective. His novel, A Mountain There, is forthcoming. He lives in New York City.
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