The Mystery of Light

     Someone once said, "The more we know, the more we know we don't know."
     Here's a quote from a book called, "Jesus Today" by Albert Nolan:
     "Einstein discovered that light sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes like a wave. The mechanistic scientists had already decided that light must be a wave and therefore they jumped to the conclusion that there must be some kind of substance in which light waves were moving. They called this hypothetical substance 'ether'.
     "Today the scientists tell us that there is no such thing as ether and that light is neither a wave nor a particle. The truth is that our human minds are limited. We cannot understand light; we can only treat it as if it were a wave, and for other purposes as if it were a particle. In fact, it is neither; it is something beyond the human mind and imagination. For us, light is a mystery.
     "Light is a form of energy and energy is of course equally mysterious--- although not nearly as mysterious as the atom. When Einstein and numerous other scientists 'opened up' the atom and analyzed its 'contents' into electrons, protons, neutrons, and numerous other 'particles' right down to infinitesimally small quarks, they soon realized that they were not in fact dealing with particles, nor waves, or any other recognizable objects. They were dealing with patterns and relationships. But how can you have patterns and relationships with nothing that is being patterned or related?
     "The mystery only deepened when the great physicist Niels Bohr came across the quantum leap. Electrons, which we have to treat as particles moving around in an orbit, sometimes jump from one orbit to another without passing through the space between the two orbits. How is that possible?
     "There are any number of other puzzles that defy explanation, not because we do not have enough evidence but because in the subatomic world, the empirical evidence is self-contradictory. There seems to be no logic or rationality down there. It is, to us, a very strange world.
     "The latest theory, or way of describing what appears to be happening in the subatomic world, concerns the quantum vacuum. Ninety percent of any atom is empty space, a vacuum. there is nothing there, not even the hypothetical ether. But electrons and all the other 'particles' that seem to be spinning around in the atom emerge out of this nothingness and then disappear again, into it. In the words of the mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, 'elementary particles crop up out of the vacuum itself--- that is the simple and awesome discovery... the base of the universe seethes with creativity.' Further on, he becomes almost mystical about it: 'I use 'all-nourishing abyss' as a way of pointing to this mystery at the base of being.'
     "The universe is not what it used to be. It is not a machine. It is a mystery."
     The observations quoted above helped me to get a bit better grasp on Genesis, chapter 1, verse 3:
     "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
     The reason that verse has always puzzled me is because it wasn't until verse 15 that God created (what we would deem as) the 'sources' of light. How could there have been light before there was a light source? Yet, according to Genesis, light was the first thing on the earth that God created.
     Well, He is God. He doesn't have to follow any rules. It seems that whenever we try to put God in a box, He just breaks out of it, ...or jumps out of it, without breaking the box.
     "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8,9