Saturday 8 January 2000

Pic of the day: While shopping groceries today, I happened upon this yoghurt ice from my favorite ice factory. Containing only 0.4% fat, it is called "Living lite". I loved the name, and so I bought it. (Also I am an avid yoghurt-eater normally.)

You know, that expression lends itself to so many interpretations. Most of them great. The first and most obvious (when printed on a package of food) is "light" as opposed to "heavy". Living life without an extra burden, in this case fat. (Tell me about it, I carry around ca 10 extra kg of fat which I rarely have any use for.)

But of course there are other burdens that can weigh heavier on a human than some well placed fat. The burdens of the soul are often much heavier than those of the body. A weight of worry, a weight of anxiousness, a weight of guilt ... they press our spirits down, and both soul and body suffer too. How good it is to find the burdens that are not necessary, and unload them! We can straighten up, and the spring comes back in our steps. Living light.

Not to mention that we are living lights. This expression is often used for candles, whose flame seem to move as if with a life of its own, subtly changing shape over time and flickering as the air moves. The candle flame retains its reasonably steady form by gradually drawing in more organic material (usually some form of fat) and burning it. The life in us humans is the same. We derive all our energy from burning organic material, mostly carbohydrates, but at a lower temperature than a candle flame, and in a more controlled form. The living light in our body performs other work before it is allowed to radiate as heat. While sitting at my desk, I radiate about the same amount of energy as a tallow candle, close to 100 Watt.

If we climb further down the food chain, we find our friends the plants, who assemble the hydrocarbons burned by people and candles. And how do they do that? By capturing a piece of the sun's light. The light of the candle and the thought of our brains are sunshine, stopped on Earth for a while before it travels on as electromagnetic radiation of a lower frequency, heat. For practical reasons we people do not emit visible light, but in the infrared spectrum we shine brightly, like walking flames in the cold night - living lights.

Once upon a time, there was much puzzlement as to what kept the sun shining. The ancients had consider the sun a god, shining and heating the world by its godly power. With the onset of mechanical thinking, the sun was assumed to be a fire itself, but what could be burning with such a heat and for so long? Then in the late Newtonian universe, some thought that the sun was heating as it was contracting, from its own gravity. Only in our century have we understood that the sun is heated by atomic fusion. The breakthrough was the understanding that energy and mass are fundamentally the same ... as symbolized by the famous E=MC^2.

The sun is a thousand times wider than Earth, its size dwarfs our powers of imagination. Even a sunspot is larger than our planet, and if the Earth fell into the sun it would only create a minor disturbance there. (But a big one for Earth.) Deep in the heart of the sun, overly excited atomic nuclei race around at high speed. Every so often, two or more of them collide. Mostly it is hydrogen that gets fused into helium. In the process, a small fraction of the mass is lost. Mass is converted into energy. But the energy is not the light we see. The atomic energy in the core of the sun is, like that of a hydrogen bomb, mostly lethal gamma radiation. Only more intense than in a bomb. Could you take but a pinhead from the core of the sun and place it over Earth's largest city, so hight that it could be seen from all over town, the energy from it would kill every man, woman and child in the city and set its buildings ablaze.

The energy from the core of the sun is absorbed by the dense layers around it, and then radiated again as slightly less intense energy. As it travels outwards, the gamma rays are slowed down to X-rays. And still they are absorbed by new layers of gas, which churn restlessly, bringing the energy closer to the surface. One thousand years the energy travels through the dense layers of the immense globe. On the way it changes from lethal radioactive rays to the light and heat that we bask in on an early summer day, the light that keeps us all alive.

There are those who claim that there exists a spiritual reality, as real as the physical world if not more so. (For if you are born blind, you can only know of the visible world by others' account, and if you are born deaf you can not know for certain that sound can be heard. But you can still experience your own consciousness and communicate with other conscious beings.) Be this as it may, I can certainly not force you to believe in such an invisible reality; but in practice it makes sense to act as if it is real. For seeing ourselves and our friends as slabs of meat governed by randomly racing electrons is not conductive to constructive debate. After all, most people speak neither to their Sunday steak nor to the static on radio.

Whether we now see the spiritual world as "really real" or just a symbol, an abstraction, it remains that people throughout the ages and in different cultures have perceived it in strikingly similar ways. The various religions, philosophies and mystics all praise the Light as a good thing. They see a Great Light that seems to be the source of all consciousness and creativity, and the human spirits as lesser lights, coming from the Great Light and perhaps returning there one day. The mystics look around them, and they see their fellow human as ... living light.