Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind by Arthur Zajonc. Oxford University Press, 1992; 400 pages, ISBN 0195095758, paperback, $19.95.
Arthur Zajonc discusses light in its physical and spiritual aspects, as well as the history our attempts to perceive it and to understand what light is through the approaches of physics and psychology, mathematics and intuition, science and art. To perceive light we first need to learn to “see,” and he uses the parallel of an eight year old boy given an operation to restore his visual apparatus, yet the inner map of the world, the inner eye, had not been trained. He was not sure he of what he had seen, and only by cross-referencing by feeling the hand waved before his face did he comprehend that his eyes had perceived this hand. In a similar way we learn to see inner things, and this book, like the process it outlines, is a great marriage of science and spirituality. – Amanda F. Rooke