To help ensure the health and safety of our community we have transitioned to "no contact" delivery. We will contact the recipient to coordinate that their gift will be left at the front door or other safe location. NOTE: Due to the unique nature of each flower's availability some substitutions may be necessary. White alstroemeria, snapdragons and stock in a beautiful basket is a gift of caring that brings an air of serenity to the memorial service.
Later, it will be a comfort for the family at home. This exquisite bouquet includes white alstroemeria, snapdragons, stock and cushion spray chrysanthemums and is accented with eucalyptus and lemon leaf. Delivered in a natural pot basket.
These items will be delivered by us locally, or a qualified retail local florist. Call the shop at Contact us for an online response. Sending flowers online has never been easier! Jeanette Farmer, lighting director for the show, showed me around backstage. She keeps track of 2, computer-controlled lights and 1, dimmers. She can do much of her work at a console—no more climbing ladders to change filters. Little motors in the lamps do all that. She no longer uses just single-gel filters over white lights to create yellow or red or blue.
State-of-the-art stage lighting uses dichroic filters, pieces of glass with mineral coatings. These provide a purer, more intense light—the kind that made the curtain look like shimmering red velvet. The old gel filters let in a lot of "noise," while the dichroics select a very narrow slice of the spectrum. Farmer gives credit where it's due—to Isaac Newton, for realizing that white light is composed of different colors. He has hundreds of lasers, including some that arrive in the mail as gifts, newfangled lasers smaller than matchboxes, green lasers soothing to the eye—all the various descendants of a gadget he invented in the s.
He and his brothers-in-law Arthur Schawlow developed the techniques that led to what was called "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Light normally spreads out rapidly in all directions; a laser coheres the light in a narrow beam. The key to producing this beam is the basic atomic principle that says that photons—and now we're back to describing light as particles—can be absorbed or emitted by atoms. When an electron changes from high-energy, or excited, state to a low-energy state, its atom will emit a photon.
A laser exploits this process. It starts with a crystal or other medium whose atoms are prone to excitement. These atoms are slammed with light, causing their electrons to do a little dance. When they calm down, they release excess energy as photons. These photons, in turn, incite more electron dancing, which creates more photons—a chain reaction. Its physics, not magic, that causes more light to come out than went in.
The arrival of the laser was heralded by certain newspapers as the start of a new era of military death rays, the killer cousins of the Martian Heart-Ray in The War of the Worlds.
But a half century ago Townes and Schawlow weren't actually sure what could be done with their invention—or with its prototype, the maser which used microwaves instead of visible light. They just knew they'd figured out a nifty way to make light shine strong and straight. He thinks about that every time he goes to the checkout line at the grocery store, where light is used to scan the price of every product.
A laser reads the CD in his CD player. Surveyors used a laser to gauge the precise property lines on Townes's New Hampshire farm. When he makes a long-distance phone call, his words are transmitted by laser light along a fiber-optic cable. It's hard to overstate the usefulness of a tool that makes light shine straight.
Laser beams fired from the Earth have bounced off mirrors left on the moon by Apollo astronauts, allowing scientists to measure the moon's distance—across more than , miles , kilometers —to within half an inch 1. Laser surgery corrects faulty vision in an increasingly routine procedure. Built in the early s, it's a sprawling device of comical complexity and is, Hart says, the "most used light source" in the world.
The synchrotron uses magnets to guide electrons around a ring that's about the size of a basketball court. Every time an electron turns a corner, so to speak, it emits a photon. The photons fly away from the ring in what are called beamlines. There are 92 beamlines in operation on two synchrotron rings, and each one has been customized with a dazzling array of mad-scientist gadgetry—dials, gauges, valves, pumps, vacuum chambers, optical sensors, wires, pipes, and lots of slapped-on aluminum foil.
The different beamlines are used by researchers from universities, government labs, and places like IBM, Bell Labs, and Exxon.
What do they do with the light? Mostly they look at things—as you'd expect. They look at impurities in materials. They examine the porosity of rocks extracted from the Earth by oil drillers, eight of the beamlines are being used to study the three-dimensional structure of proteins in an effort to decipher some of the secrets of the human body.
For a while one of the beamlines was used for medical diagnostic procedure called coronary angiography. There was one hitch in doing the examinations: Who would want to sit in front of a giant ray gun that looks as though it could burn a hole through the Earth?
The researchers constructed an examination room with a blank wall, with only the tiny numb of the beamline apparatus peeking through. The photons here range from infrared radiations to x-rays—well beyond the range of visible light. Hart marvels that for so much human history we perceived the natural world only with visible light, that slice of the electromagnetic spectrum from red to violet.
Making use of light beyond the visible realm has allowed scientists to create a new array of images of the reality around us. Like everyone else I talked with who deals with light, Hart seemed almost in awe of the power of light. Technology constantly advances, allowing engineers to create ever brighter beams. The general rule, said Hart, is that brightness has increased a hundredfold every five years. The telecommunications industry loves light. Kathy Szelag, a vice president with Lucent's Optical Networking Group, told me, "People like my parents think we're in the Star Warspart of optical networking.
We're really in the crude oil part of optical networking. We're just at the beginning. The optimism has been tempered of late by business woes among telecommunication companies, but the technology remains impressive. Take, for example, wavelength division multiplexing. Lasers are used to beam different wavelengths of infrared light down a single fiber.
Each wavelength is its own data channel—its own pipe. Right now, a fiber can carry dozens of these channels, but that could become thousands or even millions. George Gilder, a conservative political theorist who transformed himself into an influential technology guru, has declared in recent years that light will be the medium of a communications revolution. You could have conversations in which you forget within literally seconds that the person is not present.
You see a face, the images saturates your own optical capabilities. He adds, "I believe that light was made by God for communications. Will the rotating disco ball ever make a dance-floor comeback? Above all, you have to wonder: Will we ever fully understand light? We have spent thousands of years chasing sunbeams, and even if we never quite catch them, we still discover many a marvel in the pursuit.
Modern physics, with its paradoxes and uncertainties, emerged from the study of the interaction of matter and light. Modern cosmology, including the stunning revelation that the universe is expanding, came from the scrutiny of faint galactic light.
Modern computer engineering may eventually turn to light, crafting devices that, instead of silicon chips, have light beams at their core. There have been recent headlines about scientists finding ways to make light go faster than the speed of light.
This is what science fiction writers and certain overly imaginative folks have dreamed of for decades. If you could make a spaceship that wasn't bound by Einstein's speed limit, you could zip around the universe far more easily. Information can't. There's no possibility of time travel. I asked Wang why light goes , miles a second , kilometers per second and not some other speed.
There are scientists who don't like "why" questions like this. The speed of light just is what it is—that's their belief. Whether light would move at a different velocity in a different universe is something that is currently outside the purview of experimental science.
It's even a bit out-there for the theorists. What's certain is that light is going to remain extremely useful—for industry, science, art, and our daily, mundane comings and goings. Light permeates our reality at every scale of existence. It's an amazing tool, a carrier of beauty, a giver of life. What's in National Geographic magazine this month? Find new articles, maps, photos, and more online.
All rights reserved. How is it, I asked Moses, that light is such a useful source of energy? How many angels of light can dance on the head of a pin? In theory, an infinite number. I can't help but say that it has a very bright future. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Did hallucinogenic booze fuel politics in ancient Peru?
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But many questions remain. Sometimes spiritual illness comes as a result of sin or emotional wounds. Sometimes spiritual breakdowns come so gradually that we can scarcely tell what is happening. Like layers of sedimentary rock, spiritual pain and grief can build over time, weighing upon our spirits until it is almost too heavy to bear. For example, this can happen when our responsibilities at work, home, and church become so overwhelming that we lose sight of the joy of the gospel.
We might even feel as though we have no more to give or that living the commandments of God is beyond our strength. But just because spiritual trials are real does not mean that they are incurable. Even the deepest spiritual wounds—yes, even those that may appear to be incurable—can be healed. My dear friends, the healing power of Jesus Christ is not absent in our day. Whatever causes our spiritual ailments, they all have one thing in common: the absence of divine light.
Darkness reduces our ability to see clearly. It dims our vision of that which was at one time plain and clear. When we are in darkness, we are more likely to make poor choices because we cannot see dangers in our path. When we are in darkness, we are more likely to lose hope because we cannot see the peace and joy that await us if we just keep pressing forward.
Light, on the other hand, allows us to see things as they really are. It allows us to discern between truth and error, between the vital and the trivial. When we are in the light, we can make righteous choices based on true principles.
We will find spiritual healing as we step away from the shadows of the world and into the everlasting Light of Christ. The more we understand and apply the doctrinal concept of light, the more we can guard against spiritual sicknesses that afflict or trouble us on every side and hand, and the better we can serve as energetic, courageous, caring, and humble bearers of the holy priesthood—true servants and disciples of our beloved and eternal King.
Simply this: He who humbly follows Jesus Christ will experience and share in His light. And that light will grow until it eventually dispels even the most profound darkness. It means that there is a power, a strong influence, that emanates from the Savior. This profound insight—that light is spirit, which is truth, and that this light shines upon every soul who comes into the world—is as important as it is hopeful. The Light of Christ enlightens and saturates the souls of all who hearken to the voice of the Spirit.
If you open your mind and heart to receive the Light of Christ and humbly follow the Savior, you will receive more light. Line upon line, here a little and there a little, you will gather more light and truth into your souls until darkness has been banished from your life. This is the ultimate remedy for spiritual sickness.
Darkness vanishes in the presence of light. If we become comfortable with darkness, it is unlikely that our hearts will change. I found especially captivating the relationship between the earth and the sun.
I consider it a profound object lesson of how darkness and light exist. As we all know, within every 24 hours night turns to day and day turns to night. Even in the darkest of nights, the sun does not cease to radiate its light. It continues to shine as bright as ever. But half of the earth is in darkness.
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