I’ve been inspired in the past day by two things: Sarah Samudre’s post (http://ow.ly/12ROH) on the Black Rock (the late nineteenth century ship in Lost) and my physics teacher Engelbert Schucking. This will be a short post, full of scattered thoughts on light in Lost.
When Daniel Faraday firsts arrives at the island, he notices that light scatters differently with different properties. You remember-Jack and Kate are the captives of Miles and Daniel (right before Sayid and Juliet bust out with their guns), and Daniel can’t even focus on the hostage situation. He’s got his journal in hand, waving his arm at the forest canopy and the reflections of light on the surrounding undergrowth.
Engelbert Schucking is a noted cosmologist and theoretical physicist. You can google him. So far, we’ve mainly been addressing the different properties of light: reflection, refraction, interference, polarization, dispersion, and diffraction. The ones we most commonly think of are: reflection (think mirrors), refraction (the bending of light when going from one medium to another), interference (light waves interfering with each other), and dispersion (different refractions of light according to color).
Professor Schucking lectured on how all of these different properties of light work, and then began to describe how light meets our eyes. This is what he said: “Light chooses a specific path, almost as if it knew where it was supposed to be.” He means that light, from whatever source it comes from, will always choose the shortest path of reflection to our eyes. There are an infinite number of paths light could take, yet it always knows the quickest route. This isn’t a trick of the human eye, but a mathematical concept. In the course of the past few lectures, we’ve returned to this concept several times-the intelligence of light. Today he told us about an artificial medium scientists have created to slow down the speed of light, so that you can actually walk alongside a lightwave.
And this brings us back to Lost and our lovable resident physicist, Daniel Faraday. For light to scatter differently on the island, the properties of reflection, refraction, and interference of light waves would have to be radically different than what we’re normally accustomed to. The scientists who were able to slow down a light wave created that environment. What type of natural occurence would have to be present on the island to make light scatter differently? Daniel Faraday’s namesake is discussed because of his work with electromagnetic, something we know the island carries in a abundance-but is that the only thing that makes the island different? To change the functioning properties of light, it seems to me (a lone physics student) that the island would need to have more oddities at work to be such a radical medium for light.
Light is barely discussed in a scientific term other than when Daniel points it out in that certain scene. If you were smart, you clicked on the link to Sarah Samudre’s article at the top of this post, which talks in part about the epic battle going on in Lost between light and dark. The idea that light chooses its path with such specificity, always knowing where to go, reminds me of that. It will ignore every other path except for the ones that will reach the end the fastest.
Now, this could not relate at all and be a very forced connection. I am terribly sick with a cold, hence one of the tags in this post is “don’t blame me if I screwed this up.” I just thought it was interesting.
Happy Lost-watching tonight everyone!
