Journey of photon
“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.” – Richard P. Feynman
This video artwork is my first experiment with stop-motion animation, using naïve oil paintings on foam boards to tracethe journey of a single photon – from its birth deep within the Sun to the farthest reaches it could have travelled in the4.6 billion years of our solar system’s existence. While we can see light from galaxies 11 billion years away, the photonsof our own Sun have only travelled 4.6 billion light years – a reminder that spacetime itself is not smooth, but grainy,advancing in Planck-time increments, like frames in stop-motion.
A Journey of Light and Life
The life of a photon begins in the Sun’s core, where nuclear fusion creates it amid immense heat and pressure. It can take hundreds of thousands of years just to escape the Sun, before it embarks on its three-minute hop to Mercury andthen onward through the solar system and beyond. Some of our Sun’s photons are now billions of light years away, passing vast collisions of galaxies we can detect with instruments like the VLA, VLT, and Chandra observatory. That we- small collections of chemicals and electrical impulses bound to a planet – can measure and understand this is one ofthe most astonishing human achievements.
Why It Matters
Science fills me with awe. It is a way of finding things out, not just about the universe but about ourselves. We are madeof the same elements forged in ancient stars, evolved to sense and reflect on the cosmos that produced us. By followinga photon’s journey, I hope viewers will share in the wonder of what we know, how we know it, and the collaborative spirit that makes such knowledge possible. These questions – of dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, or even the multiverse – continue to inspire optimism, determination, and hope. Whether we are alone in the universe or not,the very act of asking makes our existence remarkable.
