The great French mathematician
Fermat developed “the principle of least time” for light, which treats light as
though it had intentionality. I
learned this after attending an online lecture given by Laurence M. Krauss based
on his book Quantum Man, which
deals with the life of Richard Feynmann. A link to the
lecture:
We all remember from High School Physics our teacher demonstrating the refraction of light by showing how a glass of water could make a pencil appear to bend, or break in half. The light, he explained, is trying to find the path through the diffraction medium which entails the least amount of work. What we’re seeing in this bent pencil is merely the result of this principle.
Fermat saw something in addition. Somehow, the light beam knows before it even enters the water what its correct path will be! The instant it reaches the medium, its path alters. How can it know this, even before it plunges in, and takes the necessary readings, so to speak? Fermat saw, hundreds of years before Einstein, that it was not light which was bending, but time itself.
How about that.
Science ignores the implications of this shocking fact, even more than it ignores analogous implications in quantum physics, and contents itself with merely carrying out the resulting equations in the practical realm. I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future, when I’ve bent myself back into shape.
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