Light of God

I have always been fascinated by light. It started with all the Hindu Mythological media I used to consume as a kid. God always had a bright halo of light behind him, and that enabled this idea in my head that light is a sacred thing. And later on, since I was a curious kid, I used to stare intensely at bright street lights while clutching on to my father’s shirt, sitting on the back of his motor cycle. In my head it was a stare down contest with God, but it probably was just the precursor needed to trigger my hidden superpower of double vision (or Astigmatism, as it is called in the scientific terms, which resigned me to wearing eye glasses with high power for rest of my life).

Now as a fully grown adult, I am grateful that my contests with God are limited to relevance of religion and purpose of human life, both of which don’t require staring into the street light from my balcony.

But roughly six months ago, a friend asked me if I know the reason why sunsets are red. I told him I didn’t. In a mocking tone, he asked me, “what were you doing in school?” I couldn’t tell him that I was busy starting at light rays, but anyways, that sent me into a rabbit hole of reading about the science behind light.

I started from the middle school level of “what is a wave?”, and then built up to concepts like electromagnetic waves, reflection, refraction, all such fundamental stuff I never paid attention to school. At one point, I started putting spoons in glass of water to notice how refraction seems to produce a broken image of spoon in water. A few weeks after that, I was surfing reddit and got pulled into a random conversation in the comments section under a reddit thread with a stranger, who asked me to read about the Parallax effect and Snell’s window. They were very simple concepts, but I remember the joy I had after reading about them, it was as if I had finally discovered God in something mundane.

But light has become bit of a boring topic for me lately, so I downgraded its priority in my reading shelf. I mean, yeah, light and electromagnetic waves have so many amazing applications. They enable modern communication systems, including the internet I am currently consuming to post this. They are also changing the way humans move; I see Waymo moving on streets everyday due to the LIDAR technology, which fires millions of lasers every second in environment to track the objects around it. All of these applications are revolutionary, but they do not feel very shocking to me.

But I read something today, which made me spring up from chair and start typing this. Apparently, researchers could introduce genes encoding light sensitive proteins into brain to achieve targeted firing of neurons. If this technology is correctly developed, it could literally change the way we see and perceive the world. Not figuratively, literally. If scientists can override certain neural circuits in my brain and fire the other ones they want to, they maybe able to change my thoughts and opinions. They may finally make me say yogurt is better than ice cream without lying. But of course, I am exaggerating things here like I usually do, but this is a fascinating area of study with so many positive implications for humanity

This field is called Optogenetics, and three researchers who played a crucial role in developing the ideas behind it - Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, were jointly awarded the 2026 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. It all started with Hegemann noticing an algae swimming towards sunlight, and becoming curious about how a single-celled organism like that was able to sense the light. So, this human quality of paying attention to things and becoming insanely curious is still making a difference to this world, which is great to know.