Reading Passage 1 The Power of Light

Reading Passage 1 The power of light
Light reveals the world to us. It sets our biological clocks. It triggers in our brains the
sensations of colour. Light feeds us, supplying the energy for plants to grow. It inspires us with
special effects like rainbows and sunsets. Light gives us life-changing tools, from incandescent
bulbs to lasers and fibre optics.
There has been light from the beginning. There will be light, feebly, at the end. In all its in
forms, visible and invisible, it saturates the universe. Light is more than a little bit inscrutable.
Modern physics has sliced the stuff of nature into ever smaller and more exotic constituents, but
light won’t reduce. Light is light- pure, but not simple. No one is quite sure how to describe it. A
wave? A particle? Yes, the scientists say Both.
It is a measure of light’s importance in our daily lives that we hardly pay any attention to in
it. Light is almost like air. It’s a given. A human would no more linger over the concept of light
than a fish would ponder the notion of water. There are exceptions, certain moments of sudden
appreciation when a particular manifestation of light, a transitory glory; appears: a rainbow, a
sunset, a flash of lightning in a dark sky the shimmering surface of the sea at twilight, the dappled
light in a forest, the little red dot from a professor’s laser pointer. The flicker of a candle, flooding
a room with romance. The torch searching for the circuit breakers after a power cut.
Usually, though, we don’t see light, we merely see with it. You can’t appreciate the beauty
of a rose if you ponder that the colour red is just the brain’s interpretation of a specific
wavelength of Light with crests that are roughly 700 nanometres apart. A theatrical lighting
director told me that she’s doing her job best when no one notices the lights at all. Her goal is to
create an atmosphere, a mood - not to show off the fancy new filters that create colours of
startling intensity.
Light is now used for everything from laser eye surgery to telephone technology. It could
even become the main power source for long- distance space travel. The spaceship would have
an ultrathin sail to catch the ‘wind’ of light beamed from an Earth-based laser. In theory such a
craft could accelerate to a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, without carrying fuel.
What we call light is really the same thing in a different set of wavelengths as the radiation
that we call radio waves or gamma rays or x- rays. But visible light is unlike any other
fundamental element of the universe: it directly, regularly and dramatically interacts with our
senses. Light offers high-resolution information across great distances. You can’t hear or smell
the moons of Jupiter or the Crab Nebula. So much of vital importance is communicated by visible
light that almost everything from a fly to an octopus has a way to capture it - an eye, eyes, or
something similar.
It’s worth noting that our eyes are designed to detect the kind of light that is radiated in
abundance by the particular star that gives life to our planet: the sun. Visible light is powerful
stuff, moving at relatively short wavelengths, which makes it biologically convenient. To see long,
stretched-out radio waves, we’d have to have huge eyes like satellite dishes. Not worth the
trouble! Nor would it make sense for our eyes to detect infrared light (though some deep-sea
shrimp near hot springs do see this way). We’d be constantly distracted, because in these
wavelengths any heat-emitting object glows. That would include almost everything around us.
There is also darkness in the daytime: shadows. There are many kinds of shadows, more
than I realized until I consulted astronomer and shadow expert David Lynch in Topanga Canyon,
up the coast from Santa Monica, California. Lynch points out that a shadow is filled with light
reflected from the sky, otherwise it would be completely black. Black is the way shadows on the
moon looked to the Apollo astronauts, because the moon has no atmosphere and thus no sky to
bounce light into the unlit crannies of the lunar surface.
Lynch is a man who, when he looks at a rainbow, spots details that elude most of us. He
knows, for example, that all rainbows come in pairs, and he always looks for the second rainbow:
a faint, parallel rainbow, with the colours in reverse order. The intervening region is darker. That
area has a name, wouldn’t you know: Alexander’s dark band. As I took in the spectacular view
across the canyon, Lynch explained something else: ‘the reason those mountains over there look
a little blue,’ he said, indicating the range that obscures the Pacific, ‘is because there’s sky
between here and those mountains. It’s called airlight.’ What next for light? What new application will
we see? What orthodoxy-busting cosmic
information will starlight deliver to our telescopes? Will the rotating disco ball ever make a dance-
floor comeback? Above all, you have to wonder: will we ever fully understand light?
There have been recent headlines about scientists finding ways to make light go faster
than the speed of light. This is what science fiction writers and certain overly imaginative folks
have dreamed of for decades. If you could make a spaceship that wasn’t bound by Einstein’s
speed limit, they fantasized, you could zip around the universe far more easily.
Lijun Wang, a research scientist at Princeton, managed to create a pulse of light that went
faster than the supposed speed limit. ‘We created an artificial medium of cesium gas in which the
speed of a pulse of light exceeds the speed of light in a vacuum,’ he said, ‘but this is not at odds
with Einstein. ’ Even though light can be manipulated to go faster than light, matter can’t.
Information can’t. There’s no possibility of time travel.
I asked Wang why light goes 186,282 miles a second and not some other speed. ‘That’s
just the way nature is,’ he said. There are scientists who don’t like ‘why’ questions like this. The
speed of light is just what it is. That’s their belief. Whether light would move at a different velocity
in a different universe is something that is currently outside the scope of experimental science.
It’s even a bit ‘out there’ for the theorists.
What’s certain is that light is going to remain extremely useful for industry, science, art,
and our daily, mundane comings and goings. Light permeates our reality at every scale of
existence. It’s an amazing tool, a carrier of beauty; a giver of life. I can’t help but say that it has a
very bright future.
Questions 6-10
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1? Write
YES the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO the statement does not agree with the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN there is no information about this in the passage
6. It is difficult to find a single word to say exactly what light is.
7. Thinking about the physics of light can make an object seem even more beautiful.
8. Light from the sun makes it possible for life to exist on other planets.
9. It is more practical for humans to detect visible light rather than radio waves.
10. David Lynch sometimes notices things that other people don’t.

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Reading Passage 1 The power of light

bulbs to lasers and fibre optics.

wave? A particle? Yes, the scientists say Both.

appreciation when a particular manifestation of light, a transitory glory; appears: a rainbow, a

bounce light into the unlit crannies of the lunar surface.

Information can’t. There’s no possibility of time travel.

It’s even a bit ‘out there’ for the theorists.

very bright future.

YES the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN there is no information about this in the passage

6. It is difficult to find a single word to say exactly what light is.

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