Sex, Light, and Videotape

The surprising sexiness of subatomic science

Micha Keara

Feb 14, 2026

An astronomy photograph of a supernova that looks like a human eye — Image licensed from murat4art

My partner Chi said she will not read this article. She walked away from her editorial function! She said:

“Just go ahead and publish it!”

Why? Because it is mostly about science. Science bores her.

So naturally I set out to write about a scientific concept in a way that is not boring. I hope it works.

If you are not interested in science, please stick with me — the sexy bit is at the end. If you are a scientist, go easy on me, I’m doing my best. I am an artist trying to paint a picture of your subject without representing any of your objects.

Seeing is believing … but

We tend to treat what we see as simply reality — and rarely question the lens we look through. But what are we missing?

Language is a powerful lens. The words we use and the meanings we attach to them can change how we ‘see’ or understand our reality. Words change how we define what is real — personally, socially and politically.

This also applies to science.

We live in a scientific age. Yet most of us don’t understand science, especially not something like quantum physics. As outsiders, our ability to grasp scientific concepts depends entirely on the words used by scientists to communicate their ideas.

Physicist Matt Strassler declared that his peers are actually terrible at using language to describe what they do. They use mathematics to talk to each other. When they talk to non-scientists, they seem to pull whatever words they find handy to approximate their ideas. Then we completely misunderstand them. Strassler wrote a book about this, just to bridge the communication canyon — Waves in an Impossible Sea

In my last article, I talked about the difficulties my work colleagues had in their attempts to create ‘object detection’ algorithms. I had tried to help them by declaring that there is no such thing as objects. But I only confused them more.

Still, it is an interesting idea. What does science have to say about this?

In a comment on his blog, Strassler sums it up pretty succinctly with this:

“You and everything around you are made of vibrations”

Another physicist, Art Hobson, defines those vibrations as “spatially extended bundles of field energy.”

These ‘vibrations’ occur in various fields that permeate the entire universe. Vibrations in cosmic fields. That is an interesting take on what reality is.

But even though modern physicists view the universe as vibrations within cosmic fields, the language they use still sounds like they are talking about classical objects. For example, the word ‘particle’ is a commonly used term. Particle physicists use particle accelerators to make particles collide. It’s hard not to think of bouncing billiard balls when they talk like that.

But that kind of language takes us away from important insights. For scientists these words are code for mathematical concepts. But for us as non-scientists, they just send the wrong messages, and we don’t even realize it.

In an attempt to correct some of this terminology problem, Strassler advocates for use of the term ‘wavicles’ to describe those vibrations-in-universe-filling-fields. As an unfamiliar term, he says, it is less likely to give people the wrong impression. (Although I do tend to think of tasty frozen summer treats when I hear it.)

As Strassler puts it, a wavicle “is not a dot” and “is always spread out”. That means the vibrations have a point of focus where they are most likely to occur in space. But there is no hard boundary — the odds of finding the vibrations taper off in all directions, never quite reaching zero but becoming negligible very quickly.

I’ll put that into Core-Radiance terms: each wavicle is a radiant core of vibrations. Energy at the fundamental level takes on a Core-Radiance pattern.

Taking a cosmic field trip

This Core-Radiant ‘shape’ of energy at the lowest level is true of photons, electrons, and any other type of wavicle in elemental fields. Where it gets interesting is at the point of transition from one field to another. That’s what happens when light hits the retina in your eye.

For reasons unknown to me, but nevertheless astounding, nature built fields with the ability for vibrations (energy) to move from one field to another through a process known as ‘resonant coupling’. I admit it took me a very long time to get this through my head, largely because the words I read in the various ‘explanations’ just didn’t make sense to me. So now I want to put this into my words, and I hope it will make sense more quickly for you.

When a photon hits a photoreceptor in your retina, it encounters a special molecular structure that basically amounts to a sort of ‘net of electrons’. This net comes from a group of atoms that join together in a way that makes a photon more likely to get caught. When it does, one of the electrons absorbs the energy and effectively sets off an action that could be seen as the turning of a key in a lock. When that lock is turned, it triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that sends signals to the neurological system.

The critical piece here is how the electron absorbs the energy of the photon. Without that we don’t see anything. But the way this happens is deep quantum physics — it took me a lot of probing to find a way to make sense of it. Eventually a couple of analogies came to mind that made it clear for me.

Photons vibrate in the photon field, AKA the electromagnetic field. You’ll be familiar with many of these types of vibrations. The most widely known is visible light. But other types include x-rays, radio waves and infrared heat. The difference between all these is the frequency of the vibration — which you’ll know if you’ve ever used a radio tuner.

Electrons, also, are vibrations in a cosmic field — the electron field. They, too, have frequencies and intensity levels. But their behaviour is totally different from light. If photons are the inter-galactic energy couriers, then electrons are more like the local atomic work-trucks, carrying energy through molecular structures, forming bonds, doing useful things to make up matter and power your iPhone.

For your retina to take the energy of light and give it to an electron is quite a trick. A physicist might describe this as: the photon collides with an electron, the electron absorbs the photon’s energy, putting it into a higher level of excitation which then gives it the power to twist the molecule around to trigger the neurological signal process.

Sex and the single photon

But it’s way more interesting than that. It’s not a matter of welding things together or blowing things apart. The critical part of this is that the electron and the photon are both vibrations in their respective fields. If those vibrations are compatible then the photon ‘jumps over’ from the electromagnetic field to the electron field. So what makes the vibrations compatible?

This transition is not instantaneous. It takes a finite amount of time because that’s what vibrations are — changes over time, even though everything is happening at light speed.

It may be a bit easier to understand if you think about the case of a photon emitted by a sodium lamp. It has a wave train of around five meters. That’s a measurement we can relate to — meters, not nanometers, and certainly not femtometers. So that photon stretches out a long distance. And it has within it a vibrational frequency. The higher the frequency, the more energy the photon is carrying.

When I first read about this, it reminded me of videotape.

Videotape has vibrational signals recorded onto it. The video player has a pair of playback heads mounted on a cylindrical drum. It spins around at 30 times per second (for NTSC). The signal, encoded in diagonal stripes on the videotape, uses exactly the same frequency. The tape is wrapped around the cylinder so the spinning head can scan those diagonal stripes and build up the information it needs to make a frame of the video.

If we think of the photon as the videotape and the electron as the video head, each with their own frequencies, we can see how the compatibility between them depends on an exact match between their frequencies. Any deviation and there’s no picture. And any incompatibility in vibrational frequency between the photon and electron leads to — nothing. The photon just moves along.

That, hopefully, explains how the frequencies are aligned over a short burst of time. But in the case of photons and electrons, there is no tape and no spinning tape heads. So what is actually going on there?

The electron, as small as it is, is governed by certain rules dictated by the nucleus of the atom it is bound to. Those rules restrict how the electron can interact with other particles, including photons. The rule for interacting with photons basically says ‘if you and the photon can get your amplitude up to a certain level then you can stay together’. Wow, that’s strict parenting!

So it takes a bit of time for the electron and photon to build this amplitude together. If they are compatible, their vibrations rise and fall with the same rhythm, building up the amplitude, steadily over time. We’re moving at the speed of light here so it’s not a long date — but it is potentially a meaningful time together. The amplitude builds and builds and then ... release! They join together as one!

But if they are not compatible, it’s a dating disaster. The rhythm doesn’t work out, they can’t get any build up going and eventually the photon gives up and moves on, leaving the electron in its original (lonely) state.

So looking at it this way, light hitting your retina works through endless subatomic energetic orgasms. Metaphorically speaking of course.

As surprising as the metaphor may be, it’s still fascinating to see how human lovemaking uses the same rhythmic pattern that we find in quantum transformations. And the phrase ‘resonant coupling’ applies equally to both.

Sit with that for a moment.

Interaction between subatomic particles is way more like a one-night stand than a game of pool, as most physics texts would have us believe.

From objects to the subject at hand

A lot of the language around ‘particle physics’ is hampered by the very idea that we’re dealing with particles, rather than just energy.

Of course it is easier to draw from object analogies to explain this pretty complex stuff. But there is a price for this — non-physicists like us can easily get the wrong picture about what is going on down there in the subatomic world.

Let’s retell the story of vision from a completely non-object-oriented perspective. Let’s tell it from the point of view of the energy:

Light comes to us as a vibration in the electromagnetic field racing through space towards us. It has a certain pattern to it, based on its frequency, polarization and direction. Within the retina are many other energetic patterns formed in the electron field, some of which are grouped in a way that the light energy can more easily overlap with them in space and time. When they overlap, the light energy and electron-field energy resonate because they have matching frequencies. Within a short time, they transform to become a new vibrational pattern in the electron field. The energy that was the light has crossed into a new field where it will continue to make further transformations — into chemical energy patterns, atomic motion, some dissipating into heat, some continuing as electrochemical waves into the brain.

This is not how scientists are ever going to talk about their work. It is more poetry than useful description. They label things for good reason. Scientists work with many sets of functions and methods to study and understand the real world.

They build and use the physical and conceptual tools of their trade. The tools all have names. Names we non-scientists do not understand. When they do high-level communication amongst themselves, of course they will use these names.

That’s why so many of us have no idea what they are talking about. That’s why it can be so difficult to understand science. That’s why Chi wouldn’t read this article.

The writing about Core-Radiance that we are doing here is an attempt to build a new language to understand the way the world works.

Core-Radiance is a linguistic ‘lens’ based on visual thinking and therefore able to evoke images that people can understand easily. It is not just metaphor — the images are based on observable patterns.

Our challenge is to see how far we can take this. How much Core-Radiance light can be shed on the mysteries of the world and how much can that help people? And today we are using it to open our eyes to seeing the universe in terms of pure energy.

There are no objects in the universe. Everything is energy. Shaped energy.

We might ask “what does this shaping of energy mean?” The short answer is that it is tied to the emergence of meaning itself. That is what I will explore in my next article.

This article is part 6 of a series on Core-Radiance. If you haven’t already seen the others here are the links. Enjoy!