A meditation on light

Light is conventionally thought of now as being composed of photons. Photons themselves are either particles, like the corpuscles of yore, or waves (for example, it can be diffracted a la the double slit experiment), depending how you look at them. This forces an inescapable conclusion. Light is created. It has a source. Darkness doesn't have a source, and doesn't need to be created

These considerations can give rise to weighty philosophical arguments about the nature of God and the price of Orange Roughie in the Sydney fish markets. I recommend you all to go to the Sydney fish markets, buy one of these rare and endangered fishes, and barbecue the little bastard in Bondi. Particularly good if you can surround yourself with bronzed oiled bodies on a boat away from prying eyes..

But I digress. To live, civilised man needs light. Light is created. The wisdom of the day is that the excitation of atoms by heat or electromagnetic means will liberate photons. By manipulating the conditions of same, particular types and colours of light are produced. All very entertaining so far

This was given a practical and commercial existence by an entertaining bloke called Edison. It is said that the very first lightbulbs were made decades earlier, but "Alva" was the first to turn a profit. What is not universally known is that Edison's bulbs were built upon patents he had acquired from the previous inventors. His filament was actually made of bamboo, rather than tungsten. It was with the discovery of a process allowing tungsten filaments to be made cheaply that the bulb really took off as a domestic way of creating light. They are now about 10cents

I returned to The Habitat this week to discover that in fact some of the lightbulbs has expired. Shuffled off the mortal coil, as it were... Joined the choir invisibule... I was mildly annoyed, at first. I'm sure this is the correct reaction to a dead, unreplaced bulb - a mild annoyance and a desire to smash something small and inexpensive

As I journeyed through The Habitat I grew more and more furious. An halogen down light in the kitchen was gone, as was a large screw-in spot. Three of those little ones that are supposed to look like candles were gone in the living room, one on the stairs, two in my bedroom, all the lights in the bathroom and one on the landing. Unless The Habitat has become infected with the poltergeist of an anti-social goth, then I cannot see the demise of 12 lightbulbs as anything other than some deliberate sabotage by The Flatmate. Ironically I found myself incandescent with rage in the bathroom, filled with the desire to kill and maim. It was not the simple fact of the failed bulbs, but that they had been allowed to remain unreplaced for so long

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: Over the last two hundred years some of the most intelligent scientists, industrialists and capitalists have laboured for the rest of humanity so that there might be light. These demi-gods of invention have allowed civilisation to spread down the food chain to the level of my flatmate, who completely spurns their efforts because she is a cretinous philistine and not content with insulting the endeavours of these genii, insults me by deliberately failing to replace even a single bulb in the bathroom, which is dark now from 4:43pm in the afternoon until almost 7am, and which she uses in this darkened condition, probably spreading all manner of feculent bodily filth across the room in perfect anonymity and furthermore leaving me to attend to the purchase and replacement of the said bulbs without offer of compensation or apology.