Little did I imagine, on my first ever aeroplane ride, high in the the evening sky somewhere over Ularu, the awesome view outside my window. The Southern Cross in the mid-Autumn sky sitting just above the blue layer of ozone. Above it the whole universe lifted beyond the view of the window and below its faint expanse of the dark desert landscape. The gradient of blues with a thin line of clear light blue, holding life of light and oxygen.
As I sat in awestruck wonder this gift I felt I had been handed, in a cabin full of sleeping travellers, I had no idea the expanse opening beneath me. A story unfolding as I travelled the blue. For at this time humans changed history, we created light from layers of minerals in a method previously discarded as too hard and not possible.
It was a huge moment, a watershed of technology and communication possibilities manifested, opened where only dreams once existed. The screen you read this from would not have existed. We take the easy flick of a switch, turning a light on, a TV, talking over skype or other means of communication as now common and everyday. Or children have grown up knowing no difference. We look at our collective technology pile and wonder how did we get all this so fast. Maybe it was al aliens or some hidden WW2 German project only now tested or the leftovers of the industrial military complex.
The humility of this one thing that shifted our dream for technology is lost in the chaos of change at that time. We sort of forget this one thing, the one thing that bridged a universe of possibilities, like our thin blue ozone layer. Once it was manifest, we rode on a blue wave to this unknown shore we find ourselves on, some may say the middle of an ocean. Blue in our light spectrum is fast moving, slow acting. Red is slow moving, fast acting, it is just the frequency of the wave, the wavelength that determines the light colour.
A lot of our technology relies on a high level of purity and perfection, which we know isn't as achievable in the the real world as we think it is, this is of course the vulnerability of our technology. Many things have to come together to materialise bring something from thought into reality.
The creation of the Blue light emitting diode, came nearly seventy years after the first LEDs were invented. Red first quickly followed by Green. A diode actually emits the colour of the light, it doesn't require a coloured glass, to pass incandescent light through the glass to make the colour of the light. This light emits comes from a very clever layering of minerals, layered like a tiny sandwich, produce the light from transference of electron across a band gap and falling into an electron hole. a hole present in the structure of the mineral it cross into. This happens as when electricity is passed through the layers. and as the electron crosses the gap it releases a photon, a particle of light. This particle is a wavelength which gives the light its colour. An LED is pure coloured light. The quality of the LED is down to the quality of this layering process.
I found it fascinating that in this world of scepticism toward the quality of energy transference through the medium of crystals That in our recent forgetting, we have forgotten the use of crystals in our technology mainly starting from the use of radios along many branches including the LED. LEDs wouldn't exist without a silicon substrate upon which this alchemy of science in sandwiching layers of mineral and rare earth elements develops from. The quality of the silicon is sapphire. To ensure the consistency of product this silicon substrate is lab grown. Not all labs are created equally.
To create the Blue LED Shuji Nakamura literally created the equipment needed to layer the minerals to the substrate. He would layer the substrate in the morning and then modify his instrument, using welders etc. in the afternoon and evening. then run another test the next morning and re modify his old machine in the afternoon. He literally created the blue LED from his hands. he was basically alone, pretty much abandoned by his fellow researchers mainly because they considered him unsafe to work with. He was truly out in the blue.
You could say this sounds a controlling, pursuit of perfection however he always said it is not perfect. It just needed the right combination, direction of application as the very nature of the mineral layering is not perfect due to the electron holes. He had a belief that this was possible. something pretty much all other researchers had abandoned.
When asked what drove his belief, his pursuit of the blue LED and what made him reject all advice, instruction and demands from his boss to stop his research. He told the story of growing up on an island in Japan, in a small fishing village, and looking out to the ocean, and feeling that connection. This fuelled his belief in possibility and his own certainty in himself. Shuji Nakamura received the physics Nobel prize for this little ripple in our technological progress. Just as a side note; the LED industry is what funds the superconductor scientific research and progress. LEDs are a direct result of superconductor research. A step toward a more efficient use of energy, fingers crossed.
So if you ever questioned how this watershed of technology happened; consider it started when we first looked into the sky, the atmosphere and wished to bring light into the shadows. Truly believed that what is above, is below us. When that first pilgrim stood in the light thrown onto the floor of the Chartes cathedral, from its famous stained glass windows. Bathed in purest form of coloured light available to us for close to 1000 years. The blue LED made all the colours we see in the Chartes stained glass window possible in our own humble homes. with the blue combined with the red and the green LEDs, we have white light, and the violet light and then yellow and orange etc.
A little potential archetypal response we have to Blue:
peace, calm.
communication, technology
confine, attraction.
control, command, charisma,
cooling, distance, compassion, enveloping, embrace
expansive, creative, immerse, permeate
insight, vision, dream
belief, depth, gravity
intellect, flow, float,
meditation, revelation, awe, wonder
conflict, conform, uniform, authority
communion, word, writing, language
co-incidence, manifest, culmination, completion
blueprint, form, structure, organisation
For me, as I zoomed across the night sky travelling the thin blue line, little did I know how my life would be influenced towards something so unknowable . On this trip I would carry back with me the first steps into the Aura-Soma journey, the pursuit of understanding of visions, dreams, experiences; discover pathways that have over time revealed progress towards myself, the aspect of me that has a wholeness beyond understanding. I have heard it said that this lifetime, in the scale of time and aeons is but a flash in the eye. I feel I have traversed that landscape in the dark below me in the time it a has taken to get to where I am now.
When I tripped over the story of the blue LED it triggered an expansion of insight and wonder and a view beyond the confines of my understanding of the changes in the physical environment. It is just a regular story, but rich in it's impact in our short lives. So I thought I would share a little of that wonder.
With love, Kathleen X.