A million invisible colours
December 16, 2023
By convention, the rainbow contained seven colours. But, in addition to these, he now realised, there must be other “colours”, utterly invisible to the naked eye. Millions upon millions of them.
It was an extraordinary, mind-expanding thought.
For a moment, standing on the path by the Serpentine amid squabbling seagulls, he was overwhelmed by a Faraday-esque vision of reality. All about him, stretching out to the very fringes of the known universe, was the electromagnetic field, like a vast invisible ocean of energy. And that ocean was in constant upheaval, its multitudinous vibrations filling the air all around him. And he, James Clerk Maxwell, was the first person in the history of the human race to realise this.
(“Voices in the Sky, Breakthrough, Faber & Faber)