How to render visible the invisible:

seeing light at full speed

Scientists Just Made Light Speed Visible

The images will break your brain.The method involves stitching together many thin “slices” of light reflecting off an object.

—Caroline Delbert

Popular Mechanics

October 3, 2025

…to “slice” the object, they used a setup similar to something we usually don’t want: the blinding reflection of bright light. In our homes or cars, we shift to avoid the worst of these reflections, but they’re exactly what you want when microphotographing light itself.

It’s something we don’t usually want: the blinding reflection of bright light. My stomach is fluttery, I can feel my shoulders tighten, abdominal muscles trying to hold everything in before I spill my guts. I feel the floor beneath my feet, solid if I choose to plant them. And unconditional love snuggled at my back, when I pause to feel it.

Blinding reflection of bright light…the scientists say this is how they can slice an object, and that is how to see the fastest thing in the universe. How to see light as it travels, a constant we can only perceive through relativity?

The blinding reflection of bright light slices me, or perhaps all that isn’t me, and never was, but I didn’t know it. And still don’t–I do believe in all things, more will be revealed. Feeling my heart beat, my abs unconsciously, slightly clenched, I wiggle my right calf. Is it the day? The meds? The meds are the same as any given day, but I am not. It’s rather unpredictable with my brain–like Schrodinger’s cat–the quantum indeterminacy of bipolar disorder; it’s always both. The cat is alive and dead always, and only one or the other when observed in a moment in time.

So always both–brilliant and blunted. Always both–fast and slow. Always both–anxiously tormented and ebulliently joyful. Always both–in the pit of despond, the heights of ecstasy. And what will it be today? Depends upon how much blinding bright light is shone upon me, depends upon the moment of opening Schrodinger’s box, the blinding reflection of bright light; perhaps it has been half light I have been sharing all these years; the have light of propriety, intellect, authentic parts of my soul–yes–but generally the publicly acceptable ones.

For security? Yes. Professional prudence? Perhaps. But the cost of half-light means living in part in shadows. And like seeing an object move at light speed, the fastest a thing can go, slicing together tiny fragments of it to make a whole, I too, must now bring all the slices, all the parts if I am to see the whole, if I am to shine brightly, if not blindingly.

It’s a curious thing. Bright light worsens the long covid migraine I’ve had for three years now. I call him Bob. He’s always with me. Managed with needles that inject toxin to halt the transmission of acetylcholine every quarter, managed with needles of Chinese wisdom every week. But the light? Perhaps it can bring pleasure, not only pain.

The light, blinding, I try to avoid, especially when my eyes are dilated. So often they are–the muscles of the iris, like the muscles of the face, head, and neck paralyzed open so they can gaze deep in what appears to be a black void, but when the bright light is cast, they can see inside, see inside my eyes, to the retinas torn, and torn again, and stitched together, stitched together again with frozen probes, stitched together again with lasers–there’s that bright light again. I see what they see; they take pictures. And inside, with the light reflected back to me from a screen reflecting the patterns of color in sequences of ones and zeroes that go up to space and back down to me–satellites using the precise quantum calculations of relativity–there is deep green, blue, splattered orange scars, largely in circles. They make those scars to glue my retinas in place, in those spots there are no cells left to see.

But the brain, the brain stitches together all of the slices of my world; I see it as one image, it filters out what is missing. I can’t know what is missing unless I slow down and remember: my view is partial, always, subjective, relative, we are ever looking through a mirror darkly, and now seeing clearly, again and again.

I like to think the places where I have lost my sight, I have gained my vision. Perhaps when they look into my eyes, frozen open, that is where the soul lives, my soul.