There are some phenomena that have existed since as early as time. As the first human settlements started making progress towards trying to understand the world around them, many discoveries were made. For the same reason, many studies were claimed to be falsified or redundant. David A. Carter, in his book, Our Mysterious Lives, discusses the discoveries, inventions, and studies that made a significant change in the way that we viewed our lives.
One of the phenomena that wasn’t paid much attention to until the presumptively early Renaissance was light. When a scientist named René Descartes stepped up to study light as an individual natural phenomenon, Descartes was a metaphysician, a philosopher, and a mathematician from France. Before his efforts to understand it, light was mostly studied in order to have a better understanding of how vision worked. It was thought to be a heavenly phenomenon outside of human comprehension, as the tools to study its origins were not yet discovered or invented.
Though it wasn’t until the dawn of the modern era that scientists actually made strides in the field, it only recently branched out from the old-day science —quantum physics. It was Sir Isaac Newton who, through countless trials and errors, discovered that light had a duel nature. Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist. He played a significant role in the Scientific Revolution during the 17th century. The duel nature of light fascinated Sir Newton enough to invest his time and energy into studying it.
Sir Newton came to know the true nature of light. How at times it behaved as a wave and other times as a stream of particles. Its behavior in certain environments, how it traveled, and what truly created it. He performed the famous prism-light experiment to study how light works on the electromagnetic spectrum. He discovered the VIBGYOIR spectrum during his efforts, which is more commonly known as the rainbow spectrum. The discovery that light wasn’t only what was visible to the naked human eye but also the invisible electromagnetic spectrum was also made by Sir Isaac Newton.
It was with his scientific discoveries that valuable strides in other fields were also made. Light was seen as an element that could be controlled and utilized. One such example is the understanding of the chemical process of photosynthesis by Jean Boussingault. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné Boussingault was a chemist and one of the most significant figures in the fields of agricultural science, petroleum science, and metallurgy.
He proposed the chemical equation 6H2O + 6CO2 + light yields C6H12O2 + 6O2, which represented the natural phenomenon of photosynthesis. It is a process where light reacts with several other chemicals, along with chlorophyll present in green plants, to make the atmosphere we live in breathable for us all. Without photosynthesis, life as we see it would be unrecognizable. While all components are important for the reaction to take place, it is light that triggers the reaction for the process to initiate.
David A. Carter, in his book, discusses many such phenomena. Some of them have had such a huge impact on the way we live that it has changed the course of our history. While others only had a role in making our lives slightly more convenient. But even so, almost all of them played a role in humanity taking a step towards understanding the purpose of our existence. The book is now available on the official website and on Amazon.