There is a passage toward the end of the book that relates an ongoing conversation between Einstein and Niels Bohr. Quoting the book, “All we could know about nature, Bohr argued, depended on the question asked. There might be no absolute truth about light. If it behaved like a particle in some experiments, a wave in others, then such whims had to be expected.”

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” Bohr stated. “Physics concerns
what we can say about nature.”

“Light” is a journey through the intellectual history of humanity as seen through the lens of the questions it has asked of this one particular property of reality, light. We get a sense of how all the varieties of intellectual exercise that we now distinguish as the distinct disciplines of philosophy art and science have their common source in curiosity, differing according to the nature of their questions and the responses they educe; gaining their distinctions as fields of inquiry as knowledge grows through the process of mitosis.

Within this perspective the author was able to select just the right anecdotes from his extensive research to craft a story of how discovery emerges amidst the chaos of human frailty and eccentricity. The story is always light-hearted, but never at the expense of intellectual rigor or focus. Having been plunged into this exploration, and knowing more know than I did before reading the book, I am, to the author’s credit, no less in awe of the mystery of light, and that is the greatest gift of this book.