DYK - Invisible Light

Here’s something to blow your mind—light is invisible.

I’m telling you, I heard this and it took me like fifteen minutes to wrap my mind around it. See, when we’re “seeing” light, we’re not seeing the light itself. What we’re seeing is the matter that light bounces off of.

Think of the moon, for example. The moon emits no light, but looks luminescent because light bounces off its surface. But can we actually see the sun’s rays on their way to the moon’s surface?

If light wasn’t invisible, we couldn’t see anything anywhere, because the light would just be this crazy shiny mist between our eyeballs and everything else in the world.

And if that weren’t enough, here’s another one—darkness doesn’t exist. There’s only the absence of light. Some of you are thinking, “But that’s what darkness is! It’s the absence of light!” Right, but forget about the names we give things that don’t exist. I mean, Santa Claus has a name and a definition for goodness sake. But darkness itself isn’t real. Mind-blowing, right?

That’s what I thought.