Radiate

In the beginning, there was light, and yet everything was darkness. Immediately after the Big Bang, our Universe was a photonic plasma. But the universe was so dense that light could not travel freely. It took 378,000 years - until a moment called the Primordial Light Barrier - for the expanding universe to grow enough empty space for light to be visible¹. (Not that there was anybody around to see it. But light does not care if it is seen or not. It simply is, and that is enough).

When we look at the sky, we are looking into the past. Space is big, and light takes time to travel. We see the Sun not as it is right now, but as it was eight minutes and twenty seconds ago. The North Star is 323 light years away; the light we use as a compass is a beacon shining from the year 1700. We use light from across the universe to read the historical records from all of time… well, almost all. Up until the Primordial Light Barrier. Beyond that, all is darkness.

John Herschel knew none of this back in 1839 when he coined the word “photography”, from the Greek roots photo (“light”) and graphos (“writing”). But in doing so, he stumbled - if by accident - upon an ancient truth. Light is nothing more than the written history of creation - a cosmic memoir, tattooed across the fabric of spacetime.