Elemental Philosophy

After reading Night, the parts that stood out to me the most were the art that MacAuley mentioned. My favorite pieces were Starry Night over Rhone and Brassai’s Cloak of Night. Starry Night Over Rhone makes me want to sit near a body of water at night. Cloak of Night somehow reminds me of an airport at night. The lights always seem brighter at 10 PM in an airport.

For me, the night is connected to schoolwork. I usually stay up (like right now) to finish my assignments because the day is usually too noisy for me to concentrate on work. When it’s quiet and everyone’s asleep, it’s much easier to relax and focus on studying.

If I’m outside and looking at the stars, night makes me feel small. Similar to Diane Ackerman’s point, you can’t see space during the day. Her quote, “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far-flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we
inhabit.” sums it up quite nicely.

After reading the chapter on night, I found the quote by Diane Ackerman very interesting. In the chapter she says, ” What we call “night” is the time we spend facing the secret reaches of space, where other solar systems and, perhaps, other planetarians dwell. Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we inhabit…” What I got from this quote is that night isn’t something that should be portrayed as negative, but instead as a time of discovery. During the day we cannot see past the blue sky that is illuminated by our sun, but when the sun goes down and night emerges, we get to glimpse into the infinite expanse of space without the overbearing light of the sun to hold our vision back. In places that are far from any sources of light pollution at night, you can see the hundreds of stars that are speckled across the sky.

What I found most interesting about the light and shadow reading was the science of light. The timing could not be more perfect as we are learning about light in chemistry currently. Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation that has two models that are both true but lacking. First, light is a continuous wave of energy. Light exhibits certain qualities of waves such as interference. There are multiple types of interference but the general concept is that the waves can alter other ways. For instance, waves in phase (the peaks are in line) there is an increase in intensity. Light also has a wavelength, amplitude, and frequency. The other model of light is a stream of separate energy particles called photons. Each photon travels at the speed of light and the energy of a photon of electromagnetic radiation is proportional to its frequency.