When it comes to taking a fresh look at stories from modern American history, Bruce Watson has never failed to find engaging material.
The New York Times called “Freedom Summer,” his 2011 book about the civil rights battles in Mississippi in 1964, “taut and gripping.”
Watson also earned widespread praise for his even-handed treatment of the famous murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s and the pivotal “Bread and Roses” strike in 1912 in the textile mills of Lawrence, which led to some of the first real gains for labor unions.
But the former Leverett writer — he now lives in Montague — has tackled a different kind of history in his new book, one that embraces three millennia of exploration and wonder across the globe.
“Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age,” published by Bloomsbury Publishing, takes a broad look at humanity’s long quest to understand light and ultimately to harness its use — and as such, it’s a story that chronicles how religion, art, architecture and science have all had a role in shaping the exploration of light.
For instance, different faiths across the globe all found a holy origin in the earth’s radiance — “Light is the primal ingredient of every creation story,” Watson writes — while texts from ancient Greece and other distant times reveal how deep thinkers, from Socrates to Persia’s Ibn al-Haytham, wrestled with light’s mysteries and wrote early treatises on optics. Renaissance painters, the Romantics and the Impressionists all made light a central part of their work.
Meanwhile, scientists and inventors from the 1600s on slowly unraveled the mysteries to create photography, the incandescent light bulb and the laser.
In sketching this journey, Watson offers lively mini-portraits of many notable figures, from bad-boy Renaissance painter Michelangelo Caravaggio to Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein.
He also explains the science in a straightforward way to make “Light” a highly accessible read.
In a recent phone interview, Watson, a longtime contributor to Smithsonian magazine and other publications, said the book was a challenge in many ways — but that it was also exciting to delve into a subject that encompassed new areas of study for him.
“For most of the chapters, I was starting from scratch,” he said. “I knew some pieces of European history, some of the art history. I’d written about Thomas Edison, I knew some of the Bible.” But when it came to the science and mathematics, to ancient religious thought and early studies of light, he added, “I had lots of research to do.”
But that was a pleasure in itself, he said, as was the effort to tie all the pieces together in his narrative: “It was a real labor of love.”
Watson, a longtime humor columnist for the Hampshire Gazette, brings his droll wit to his new book as well.
For example, he writes that after 1915, the year Einstein produced his General Theory of Relativity (that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity), “Pondering light’s complexities now required more than just interferometers and cloud chambers. The prerequisites now included advanced degrees in physics, the ability to fill entire blackboards with equations, and a willingness to worry endlessly about light’s latest enigma.”
He’s also woven some of his own basic experiments with light into the narrative, as well as his visits to significant sites, such as the Cathedral of Saint-Denis in Paris, the first Gothic cathedral.
Watson notes that when the building opened in 1144, visitors were left in open-mouthed wonder at the way its huge and ornate windows seemed to shine God’s own light — glittering, multi-hued, and all-encompassing — upon them.
“Imagine entering it from the mud and misery of the Middle Ages,” he writes. “What promise would you not make to live in this light? Bathed in its glory, you might doubt your chance of reaching paradise, yet the goal would be as clear as the light itself.”
The seed for “Light” came from a couple of places, Watson says. Reading a biography of Einstein some years back, he was intrigued with the way the famous scientist approached the subject of light.
For the last several years, he’s also taught in a late-summer writing program for incoming students at Bard College in New York state; the broad nature of the seminar, where the subject might range, as Watson puts it, “from Aristotle to [U.S. physicist] Richard Feynman,” suggested he could write about “the evolution of human understanding of light.”
The story unfolds mostly chronologically, though Watson offers some digressions, like his visit to Stonehedge in England to witness sunrise on the summer solstice.
Beginning chapters recount how early civilizations worshipped light (and also feared darkness) and saw it as a sign from God — or perhaps as God personified.
Watson says he discovered beautiful hymns to light in India from centuries ago, while a creation story from the Congo region of Africa describes how a god named Bumba “vomited up the sun” — after which he also regurgitated the moon, the stars, numerous animals and man himself.
The ancient Greeks and others tried to wrap their heads around light, sometimes getting things right and others wrong.
In Greece in 585 B.C., Thales recognized that moonlight was reflected sunlight, one of the first suggestions that light might not be just a tool of the Gods. But Aristotle was one of those who guessed wrong on a perplexing question of the time: Does light flow from our eyes, thus enabling us to see, or does it move in the opposite direction?
Arab scientists in the Middle Ages developed new theories on optics, and in the Islamic world, “Power’s most elegant symbol was light,” Watson writes.
Lights and candles were commonly surrounded by carved quartz shapes to make the light sparkle, and clay was mixed with metal oxides to create ceramics that “nearly glowed.”
If Europe’s response to light in the Middle Ages was to build Gothic cathedrals, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution opened new doors in the search for understanding.
Two of the most interesting sections of Watson’s book examine how painters like Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer imbued their canvasses with light and how scientists like Galileo (who greatly advanced the telescope) brought new understanding to astronomy.
Watson also devotes a whole chapter to Isaac Newton, a somewhat curious and solitary figure whose discoveries in the late 1600s about the color spectrum, refraction and other optical details made his the definitive word on light until the 19th century.
But he notes that the Romantics — painters, writers and composers alike — rejected the scientific view of light. William Blake in particular loathed Newton as “the enemy of all things spiritual.”
As the Romantics saw things, Watson writes, “If the tools of science — mirrors and prisms and equations — had robbed ‘fallen light’ of its grandeur, then the tools of art would restore it.”
Yet the 19th century also ushered in dramatic scientific and technical advances concerning light — much of it with a French accent. Augustin-Jean Fresnel, an engineer and physicist, introduced wave theory and invented a lens that became standard in lighthouses.
Louis Daguerre invented the earliest version of photography (a type named for him). Auguste and Louis Lumière — a fitting name, indeed — gave the world its first motion picture. And on the artistic side, the Impressionists created perhaps the world’s most treasured paintings.
“The French,” said Watson, “owned light in the 19th century.”
The last few chapters of his book are devoted to the modern era of light, from electricity to quantum mechanics to lasers and LEDs.
During his travels, Watson also talked with scientists who are taking light into new dimensions: crafting giant mirrors for telescopes that will search for the first light of the universe; studying how to implant self-focusing lens in eyes, which would makes glasses obsolete; and using special lasers to create the ultimate renewable energy source, hydrogen, through fusion.
Writing “Light,” he said, has also given him confidence that he can look outside of conventional history for his next book topic and similarly paint with a broad brush.
“To dabble a mile wide and a foot deep, for me, is really such a joy. I feel like it gives me the freedom to look at subjects across the millennium.”
And while he investigates those topics, he’ll take time out for one of his newest acquisitions: a telescope for studying the stars.
Bruce Watson will read from “Light” tonight, March 10 at 6 p.m. on at Booklink Booksellers in Thornes Marketplace in Northampton. His website is brucewatsonwriter.com.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.