Prelude

Basil the Great noticed that the first word God spoke was ‘Let there be light.’

‘And there was light.’ The musicians capture this outburst of brilliance in an eruption of scintillating sound, and at a performance of Haydn's Creation the audience sits up; for this moment is the genesis of amazement.

The scientist, fascinated by light, explains its paradoxical behaviour as both particle and wave, tracing another stage in that sequence of discoveries by which the speed of light, travelling across the cosmos, revealed the depth of space and time which shrinks the history of humankind to a speck in the vast story of the universe – science is asmuch the genesis of wonder as a claim to comprehension.

The cosmologist finds that all that’s made visible by light is exceeded by dark matter, known through its powerful effects mathematically demonstrated, and then discovers the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the ‘afterglow of creation’, ‘an echo, as it were, of the “explosion” that initiated the universal expansion’, commonly known as the ‘big bang’; while the biologist notes that life itself depends on light through photosynthesis.

Arthur now stares at the pattern of light and shade falling through the slats of a Venetian blind, now looks up at the complex tracery of dark branches of trees against the light sky, now creates his own version, lifting his hand with the fingers open to look through them to the bright world beyond, eyes wide with wonder.