Supplement to LIGHT

The 2005.03.19 re-edit of LIGHT to which this Supplement refers, replaced the original version of LIGHT that appeared on or about 2004.12.12. The Supplement was to have been a brief reference to the religion/science relation, but it kept on growing. In the meantime Robert M. Taylor's article on the Theory of Everything arrived, and indeed, instead of coming to a nice conclusion the subject is beginning to look just like that, the springboard for an ongoing development.

Light, in science's objective viewpoint, is an electromagnetic wave that propagates at about 186000 miles a second. Associated with greater time intervals, this speed, which is accurately known, is used to define astronomical distances.

Subjectively light is that which makes vision possible. Then, further than this, religion associates it with the good and true, as distinct from the bad and false, which is referred to darkness.

This polarization into scientifically and religiously established sides emerges if we type ‘light’ into a search engine. For instance, the search may return the top several hundred finds ‘of about’ 100,000,000.

Add the word ‘science’ to light and the find may decrease to about 20,000,000, being references to electromagnetism. Take out ‘science’ and add ‘religion’ instead. The pool may reduce to about 8,000,000.

Search for the word God. The find may be about 90,000,000. To ‘God’ add the word light. The find may be about 15,000,000, declaring a relation, affinity or identity of God and Light.

Religion refers light to the intelligence of social behavior. Science refers it to the electromagnetic spectrum. The different descriptions are more than a technicality. Their very insularity points to the unity in difference of a greater meaning, namely that of mind in consciousness.

The Buddha is described in Asian theology as the Light of Asia. Jesus is almost routinely described as the Light of the World. The Koran describes God as the Light of the World, the Light of Heaven and Earth, the Light that dispels darkness. The link between light and religion is pervasive, against which that between light and science stands apart.

Science limits itself to objective findings, seeing light therefore as an objective reality, wherein it becomes the substance of materiality. A hundred years ago science held that matter was the foundation of reality, energy being one of its properties. Then, from early in the 20^th century, later confirmed in the explosion of the atomic bomb, science came to know that it can and must take the sides, matter and energy together.

Philosophically, however, this unity of sides remained barren, devoid of all but formal expression. The next step for science is to see that matter and energy, or bodies and their motion are but one side within a higher realm; that of consciousness which takes everything back to mind, or God in the form of religion, standing squarely before it.

Objectivity and subjectivity stand aloof in current science. Peace reigns between them across a no-man's-land of inactivity, with no communication between the sides. Mathematics as the Physiology of Mind traces a pattern between knower and known within the inner realm of neurological process. It remains to trace the matching pattern within society itself. The two sides, internal and external, will then indicate the larger dimension of mind as the foundation of all reality, exactly as the ancients taught, but in more explicit detail in keeping with our more highly advanced civilization.

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Science studies the form of radiant energy as electromagnetism from short-wavelength gamma rays at one end of the energy spectrum, to radio waves at the other. In this description of its physical existence light is an interaction between magnetic and electrical fields at right angles to each other. The magnetic component takes the place of what was formerly the material anchor, matter as essentially inert, subject to secondary motion. The electrical component maps to motion or change of place, with light as the medium in consciousness between rest and motion within the framework of reality.

Religion, differently, refers to light as the form of consciousness wherein thought and behavior arise. Belonging wholly to the domain of understanding and behavior, its sides are good and bad, having to do with mind, not materiality.

The Speed of Light

Science defines the speed of light, not as constant, but as the criterion of constancy. It is not only constant in our scientific judgement, but the very acme and definition of constancy, which makes it an overlay of matter and brings the two together in an identity.

At the same time, the substance of this identity is difference, and this coincidence of absolute opposition is the Hegelian triad that lifts component moments to a new identity on a higher level. The higher identity in this case will be that of mind in consciousness. Such is the postulation. The task is to fit the components into a logically consistent entity.

Science leads the way. It is simply stated; the speed of light is independent of the motion of its source. Within the reciprocal unity of relativity (the Lorentz transformation) this taking of sides maintains science’s intrinsic unity, formerly invested in the primacy of matter, and subsumes it in a deeper logic.

Conversely, the same criterion corresponds to, or is the stillness or identity of motion, its absolute expression. Our name for this ‘stillness of motion’ is space. If it were not absolute light speed would be relative, so not an identity. The definition of light’s speed as absolute elevates motion as well to the status of an identity, and this birth of motion into objectivity, corresponds to and is our recognition of time. The latter in turn is the objective anchor of our sense of self as conscious being.

The constancy of light’s speed represents our intuition of matter as the common ground of our knowledge. It is therefore a reciprocal two-sided constancy and the ground of all subsidiary stillness, together with the secondary motion of finite identities, whose inverse is our understanding. On this basis our sense of materiality arises and stands.

In these relations scientific definition loops around and links to the religious definition of light as the luminescent identity of truth and understanding, a circuit that finds the identity of mind, its original form as the criterion of consciousness within the all-embracing hegemony of mental, and so spiritual being.

In this unity each side matures. Science and religion join, each completing in the other in a unity that defines the maturity of knowledge and understanding. Science, finding its soul, steps forth from technology. Religion finding its truth, steps forth within the unity of all knowledge, no longer subject to internal division and external discord.

Mind and matter as we know them are not exclusive in their difference, but component sides within consciousness. They are distinct, but distinct in consciousness, as sides of one and the same infinite mind. As a first step (Mathematics as the Physiology of Mind) we have already seen how, in a circular setting, knower and known relate as sides within the mind. This ‘within’ is the internal bridge, the physiology in the function of the brain that links sense and understanding. The internal bridge however, depends upon its external counterpart.

The article, ‘Light’, focuses upon this external bridge, the link that, in its full expression, comprises social interaction and behavior. The ancients in their wisdom corralled all knowledge of detail and distinction within one identity, which they named, insofar as they could find a name for that which names everything, God.

That which “names everything” referred inversely to their own nature as conscious beings, and therein they crossed the threshold from reactive, we could say unreflective or animal consciousness, to human self-consciousness, the evolutionary birth of our kind.

Our awareness that the unity of religion and science, within the complexity of infinite difference and diversity, is and remains irrevocably one with the commanding unity and identity that founds civilization, brings that ancient understanding up to date.

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