Light Fantastic is the title of a television documentary series that
explores the phenomenon of light and aired in December 2004 on BBC Four.
The series comprised four programmes respectively titled: "Let There be
Light"; "The Light of Reason"; "The Stuff of Light"; and "Light, The
Universe and Everything." The material was presented by Cambridge
academic Simon Schaffer.
The final episode explores the
relationship between light, the eye and the mind and the development of
technologies such as photography and cinema. The achievements of John
Dalton; Benjamin Thompson; Thomas Young; Lord Rayleigh; Joseph
Priestley; Thomas Wedgwood; Eadweard Muybridge; Etienne Jules Marey and
Albert Einstein are discussed.
From their knowledge of colour
blindness, some Victorian scientists believed they could prove the
perceived cultural supremacy of the English by measuring differences of
colour perception in different races. The idea was that animals were
lower down the evolutionary scale but had better atuned senses than
humans. If it could be proved that black people had better responses to
light and colour this would be evidence of their inferiority. In 1898
William Rivers, together with a group of Cambridge academics, set off
for the Torres Straits to prove exactly this. Rivers used a tintometer
but found his original hypothesis was false and that the range of
"colour difference perception" of the islanders was little different
from that of the English. When Rivers returned to England he spearheaded
dissemination of the fact that there was no scientific evidence to
support white supremacy.
The programme continues and describes Priestley's discovery of photosynthesis.
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