LETTITOR-

 
 
  
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Ive been thinking a lot about light this week. Light plays a
critical role in our existence, yet it seems to get little atten-
tion. Proper lighting is critical, just ask any set designer or
art gallery owner, Poor lighting can add twenty pounds,
make bags under the eyes glow like radioactive mud, and
leave you looking all pasty and sick.

Current theories suggest that light can act either as a
wave or a particle, leading me to postulate that by its very
nature, light is as mysterious as it is illuminating. You can
feel light headed, you can light the way, or you can even
attach light’s evil twin brother, the laser beam, to the head
of a frickin’ shark.

Light is weightless. Light is symbolic. As a major source
of both our vision and our lives, light is the one principle
whose opposite is defined as its absence. Darkness is the
nothing that results from the absence of light.

The Heisenberg Principle suggests that the very act of
illuminating something in order to observe it somehow
alters the object viewed on a molecular level. If that’s true,
everything we see is actually that thing interacting with
light, which then interacts with our eyes, retinas, and nerv-
ous systems.

If Heisenberg is right, it seems to me that we actually
live in a world inhabited by verbs rather than nouns...and
that everything that we can see and experience is at the very
least a process of a minimum of two things interacting. My
finger flips a light switch, the light hits my room, the room
is altered, I experience the room. And although it all
appears to be happening instantaneously, the light is actually
traveling at roughly 186,000 miles per second. Baffling!
Amazing!

Our sleep patterns have changed drastically since the
advent of artificial light. For instance, current theories hold
that in the pre-artificial light days, humans actually slept for

 

a few hours just after dusk, then awoke and went about vis-
iting and eating (in the dark, I suppose) and the such for a
couple of hours before retiring in the mid-night until dawn.
Nowadays, an after-dark walk reveals the blue flickers of
TV screens in dark rooms more often than not. Cathode-
ray lights drape the bulk of our population until bedtime,
even after the lights are out.

Another current theory suggests that we may be doing
more than simply wasting time in front of the tube; we may
be irrevocably damaging ourselves. Falling asleep in lit
rooms, whether by candles, electric lights, or televisions,
precludes the brain from producing melatonin, the drug
that triggers the human brain to reach the rejuvenative state
of deep sleep we need to recharge. This lack of melatonin
production not only leads to the myriad of health risks
associated with sleep deprivation, but has also been linked
to the drastic rise in breast cancer rates among first-world
women in recent decades. As the light giveth, the light
taketh away.

I’m yet to see the light about why I’m so taken with illu-
mination this week. What I have seen, however, is one high-
ly informative, stunningly entertaining college newspaper.
And the name of that paper my friends, the name that
should be up there in lights, is The Other Press, So find a
well-lit spot and let us light the way. Throw open the
spring-time curtains, it’s OP time.

—Colin Miley, Managing Editor

 

   

 

 

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