Discourse by Arthur Zajonc
Light’s touch changes everything. What lay shrouded in darkness is revealed, and hidden spaces suddenly open wide under light’s dance. In itself, unseen, we see by means of light’s selfless activity.
In physics, the refinement of light’s touch is measured by its wavelength. The very smallness of visible light’s internal patterned movement guarantees that the tiniest detail, the most subtle texture, remains visible. The brushed surface of metal and the filamentary strands of the spider’s web would both fade into invisibility if light were larger, its wavelength longer.
Einstein alerted us to the unique role played by the speed of light, which is a universal absolute in a relative universe, an ultimate limit in a limitless cosmos. He and Max Planck discovered that, although massless, even light has its least part – the quantum or photon. And yet that quantum, like light itself, eludes our conceptual grasp, maintaining its subtle ambiguity and wholeness through all attempts to confine and define it. Over countless years, starlight travels from the most distance reaches of space and from the beginnings of time to reach our eyes. In a miracle of reciprocity, our eyes are so perfectly adapted to light that only a few light quanta are needed for sight. What to our sensibilities is the long journey of light through the cosmos lasting ten billion years, is to the photon a mere instant – such are the mysteries of relativity.
Through the mastery of fire we first brought light from the heavens to hearth and home. By the light of a candle we reflect or read, draw or pray. Its timeless lux spreads out from a small flame to brighten a chamber, but then it swiftly travels beyond us into the night sky answering the luminous call of the stars: our light meeting starlight face to face.
When our bodies are brushed by light, we warm and open ourselves like dark sanctuaries to the penetrating luminosity of sun and sky. No wonder cathedral builders knit geometry to light in service of theology; no wonder evolution has knit plants to the silent power of sunlight in the service of life. Light is the architect of the organic world, and conversely in architecture “structure is the giver of light” – so wrote Louis Kahn.