A Point of Light

“Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.”

When I was a child, I had a telescope.  I learned the names of the stars and the constellations.  I tried to fathom the vast distances that separated one star from another and them from me.  I looked up in wonder.

My favorite constellation was Orion, visible in the winter sky with its two bright stars Betelgeuse and Rigel, and its belt made of three aligned stars.  The brightest, yet most distant of these three stars is the middle star Alnilam, Alnilam meaning ‘string of pearls’ in Arabic.  Scientists have studied Alnilam and estimate that it is four-million years old.  It is a ‘bright supergiant’.  Its distance from earth is approximately 1350 light-years.  When I look at Alnilam, I look at history.  The point of light I see and call Alnilam started on its journey at a time when the world’s total population was just over 200-million people, when Constantinople was the world’s largest city, when Mohammad had just died and when Islam was in its early ascendancy.

I ponder the mystery of light.  How does a point of light, a photon starting from a distant star, penetrate the emptiness of space and reach my eye?  How does that point of light trigger the chain of reactions that occur within my retina and my brain that causes me to perceive that light?  How does my perception become conscious awareness of that light that began its journey over a thousand years ago?

Scientists ponder the mystery of light.  I learned in Physics about the paradox of light.  It is both a wave and a particle.  It is both, and it is neither.  In other words, our language and our knowledge are not enough to penetrate the mystery and complexity of light.  Einstein’s great insight was that light always travels at a constant speed, and that there is no such thing as real time and real space.  Light is absolute in an otherwise relative universe.

I am no Einstein.  For me, these are difficult and mystifying concepts.  I understand that there is a complex and mysterious “out there” that I perceive with limited understanding.  I really know very little about this complex universe.  But I look at the sky, at a billion points of light, and find solace in the mystery.  The stars remain beyond human explanation, beyond human reach, and beyond human folly.

Mystics ponder the mystery of light.  I am no mystic, but I’ve read the Kabbalistic story of creation, about the Light of creation and the primordial Vessel that was created to contain the Light, and how, when the Vessel could no longer contain the Light, the Vessel shattered.  I am unable to understand the mystery of a single point of light.  Yet I, like the primordial Vessel, must receive the constant influx of almost infinite points of light.  The light is contained in the images and memories of my mind.  And, miraculously, I don’t shatter.

If I taught Science or if I taught Sunday School, I would want my students to ponder the mystery of light, to reflect on the journey of a point of light from its moment of creation to the moment of awareness.  I would want them to look up at the stars in wonder.  I still do. 

 

Addendum:  Years ago, I told my wife that should I die first, and should there be an afterlife, I will signal her by becoming a star in the sky.  I told her to be on the lookout for a fourth star in Orion’s belt.  Since the universe is expanding and Orion is getting older, he could probably use the extra size.