[Guille]

What if instead of being light something, it is the absence of something? I believe this could be because it feel slike darker colours are much more 'full' than lighter ones. So I believe darkness is the presence of photons and light is the absence of them.

[mkirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by <<>> What if instead of being light something, it is the absence of something? I believe this could be because it feel slike darker colours are much more 'full' than lighter ones. So I believe darkness is the presence of photons and light is the absence of them.

An interesting point young man!
But how would one knowthat for sure?

kind regards michael.

[jim barlow]

Harmony girl, we should not consider darkness as if it were just another kind of light. It is a complement to light somewhat like the eyeball is a complement to the picture in the brain.

Instead of the bifurcated (very entertaining) vision criss crossing everything, showing everything as contrary or complementary, it is a good exercise to aim at total vision.

In solving time riddles for example it is a must. I.e. not looking at segments but totalities which do precede the segments.

Why that is not obvious immediately is another interesting feature.

[harmonygirl]

Jim, so is darkness then another aspect of 'being'? Light is usually described as 'Life" (spiritual and religious references are made), is darkness 'being' but without the negative connotations that are usually ascribed to it?

[Guille]

Originally Posted by mkirkpatrick An interesting point young man! But how would one knowthat for sure? kind regards michael.

We are not very much of 'scientists' in this forum. There is something I'm tought in school called scientific method, maybe you remember something about it... It is not very usefull anyway. We should develop an experiment sort of like this:

Aim
To discover the nature of 'darkness particles' which are sort of the anti-concept to photons (not in energy but in light).

Hypothesis
The darkness particles will be masless and will travell at speed of light, as they will be electromagnetic waves, not light itself (as of the concept which we describe by the wave/particle duality). It will be explained with the wave-particle duality, or a better new idea that might be developed from the observations. All these are derived asusming the conditions for this particles are the same as those of photons (based on the lines developed by Faraday, which in inverted form are the lines of our 'light').

Then we should develop a Method usefull to control all psosible variables and investigate free of conditions. Then we should collect our results (the measure of the speed of the particles, the mass which we believe to be 0, the magnetic fields and electric fields produced...) and by analizing these we should achieve a conclusion, evaluation and extension. If I had enough time to think about an experiment to develop, I would, but school is eating me. I will eat it back one day.

[jim barlow]

There are many ways to talk about darkness and light I can think of 2 picturesque traditions. One is in gnosticism.

Originally, it says, it was all light. Then came the forces of darkness and occupied a good chunk of the light. Then the light started beating back the dark etc etc to this moment.

The other is I think in the opening canto of Dante's Paradise. The whole canto is about the nature of light, how special it is. It almost reminded me of Einstein. The net effect I think was as we enter Paradise we pass through a special kind of gate whose base reaches into Purgatorium but the gate is not made of the substance of this world, it is made of light.

Einstein, the great geometrist, took as absolutely central one of the qualities of light and bent spacetime and everything else around it.

I think though that positive and negative, light and dark, good and evil
god and devil, music and silence need each other and cannot exist without their oppositions.

But that wouldn't make a good movie: the murderer and the detective walking into the sunset arm in arm realizing they need each other for the movie.

[michellemfry]

I believe the detective inexorably chases the murderer into the sunset, and it is a common dramatic tool, for good reason, you can rely on the characters involved. Good one.

[harmonygirl]

Jim, good point about the way in which we divide our environment into pairs of diametrically opposed opposites. This leads me to wonder why darkness isn't more a mirror of light. As Michelle had pointed out, there is no speed of darkness. Nature abhors a vacuum and I don't think that darkness is simply the absence of light. Man-woman, heaven-hell, wet-dry, all the pairs have characteristics that distinguish themselves, none is defined simply as the absence of the other. Why would that approach be different for light?

[jim barlow]

Hi, it is not different for dark. Look at dark as a woman and light as a male with the rays penetrating the darkness which is the fruitful one. I've been trying to say that dark is NOT just the absence of light, it is a separate "personality".
Nothing is NOT the absence of something. It is a potential (or womb) to continue with the symbolism). No-thing is not only the absence of thing, it is again a separate personality.
All continues to come out of nothing.
But I got a step ahead from the "dark".
Language can be tricky.
Consider: "non-existence is the absence of existence."
Fishy, isn't it?

[michellemfry]

Dark, I am wondering if it is without motion, whereas light has a definite speed. And possibly that the dark is the only stationary reference system that truly exists as stationary in the universe.