I Love Light
I have a certain affinity to light. I guess we all have, but for me, I love warm sunny days, the warmer the better, I won't say its too hot until the Mercury tips past 40 degrees Celsius. I also work with light every day at work, as I am an Optical engineer and the kit that I configure and design with known as DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing basically uses light to carry information around Ireland and indeed all around the world. All of the voice, broadband and television that I use and everybody uses passes through a DWDM system and usually more than one at some point along the way.
That is why you can talk to friend in America on the phone without noticeable delay or latency and why you can download a file from server on the far side of the world in milliseconds. It's not magic, it's Physics. Your conversation and browsing are made possible by photons bouncing inside fibre optic cables for thousands of kilometres (km)
Right now, as you read this post, you are making use of the Physics of light which travels at 299792km per second. Given that the circumference of the world is 40,075 km, that means that light can travel around the earth around 7 times in one second. So all your phonecalls, data and TV content gets modulated into light at the A-end say in Galway and is transported via multiple DWDM systems, many of which span seas and oceans to connect continents to get the B-end, let's say New York and there the Light is Demodulated. Essentially Transceivers, which are wavelength-specific lasers that convert electrical signals into optical signals or light are used on each side of the DWDM systems.
That light is then split using gratings or little gaps or filters which act like prisms and break the white light into 88 different individual wavelengths, each of which can be used to carry huge amounts of data. Currently the max is around 800Gig per Wavelength, although 100Gig and 200Gig are much more common at the moment.
These systems are either land based if you are staying in country with your traffic or else sub sea if you need to cross to another continent or far away country. This map shows some of the sub sea systems I mentioned, which are basically huge cables laid on ocean and sea floors. Trust me when I say it's no fun when these break! You're talking high tech boats, submersible robots and long long hours of overtime.
Live with light
Of course none of us would be here without the light from our nearest star the sun which heats our planet and provides the light needed for photosynthesis to occur within plants. Without this photosynthesis, plants would not grow and we'd have no food or medicines.
So you are probably beginning to see why I love light so much.
I love the way it ushers in a new day at dawn and watching it disappear for a while at dusk. I love how it is used to connect us all by phone, email and text message. I love how it sustains us and our planet. I love how it is used in photography and that is what I'll share with you now. These are some photos that I took on my way to Dublin a couple of days ago. The sunrise was so glorious that I pulled in a couple of times to appreciate it.
Here are a few of these photos:
Light is truely exceptional and when we look into the nightsky at the stars we are actually looking back in time because the light would have left some of these far of stars hundreds,thousands and even millions of years ago, after all it can only travel at 300,000km per second and many of the stars and galaxies in the night sky are billions and trillions km away. In fact some are so far that we don't use km to measure the distance, but instead use light years, which is the distance that light travels in one year. If it travels 300,000km in a second, think about how far it goes in a year and our closest star Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away or 300,000 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60km away! So the next time you look at a star remember that it's quite possible that dinosaurs were roaming the earth when that star emitted that light!
Maybe now you see why I love light so much and I haven't even gotten into the spiritual importance of light.
This put me in a good Moooooood
Sorry I couldn't help myself, Dad joke extraordinaire! I thought it made a pretty cool photo seeing this lot getting herded over the motorway!