light.

(North Kohala, Hawaii, USA)

The night is far spent, the day is at hand…

Romans 13:12 (NKJV)

Light came with words. The spirit of God was hovering over the waters in a world of darkness, and with the voice of God, light was spoken into existence. No longer were things hidden, obscure, but they were made evident, defined. With light, we are graced with the ability to take in and comprehend the beauty of the world around us, specifically through colors; colors, however, are not what they would automatically seem.

In 1665, Isaac Newton, at the time a young student in Britain, conducted an experiment with light. Newton allowed a ray of sunlight to pass through a prism, and found that that when the sunlight was refracted, it refracted a band of many colors, or what is actually the entire spectrum of visible color. Newton came to the conclusion that “white light” is not in itself white, but is actually made up of all other colors (Burnie).

Thanks to these experiments, we can know that certain objects are not colored in and of themselves; rather, we only see color in objects because of the type of light they absorb, and the type of light they reflect. This process is known as “color subtraction.” For example, when the three primary colors of the spectrum (red, green, and blue) are directed towards an object, if the object absorbs the green light and reflects the red and blue light, our eyes will mix the reflected colors of red and blue, causing the object to appear as a magenta tone. If the spectrum of light is shone at an object, and all the colors are absorbed, reflecting no light, the object will appear to our eyes as black (Burnie.)

When light was made to exist, an interesting turn was taken for all that had existed previously (at this time it sounds like there was only a formless sum of water). With reality illuminated, no longer was existence absorbed in “blackness;” instead, the world was made capable of something new: hues, gradients, textures, pigment, and eventually even the knowledge of these. With the addition of such a dimension, no longer would darkness keep all things hidden within itself, but there would now be lightness, made to contain and communicate all colors, existence, and truth.

In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

John 1:4-5 (NKJV)

Source:
(Burnie, David. Light. 18-19, 28-33. Dorling Kindersley. 2000.)