0237
27-11-2024
Where is the light?
Merijn Bolink
Artist
My Vedute manuscript consists mainly of a question, a question to which I have not been able to find an answer. Suppose I am looking at a burning candle. The candlelight somehow manages to reach my retina, but we do not see it moving through space: someone standing next to me and looking at the beam of light, as it were, sees nothing of the candlelight. My question is, in short: how is that possible? What is that light when it floats through space? There are plenty of scientific explanations, but I get lost and cannot find a satisfactory answer: light is supposed to consist of photons, particles without mass, but at the same time of waves, pure radiation. Even more contradictory: by observing it, we partly determine how light behaves, as experiments show. No matter how deeply science penetrates into the essence, the same applies to everyone: everything we see passes through the same retina, a receptor of 1 cm2 at the back of each eye, we form only a very limited representation of what can actually be seen.
