Why don't you fall through your chair? It sounds like a silly question until you look at what a chair is made of. Your chair, like you, is made of atoms. And atoms are almost entirely empty space. If the nucleus at the center of an atom were the size of a pea, its electrons would be spread out to roughly the edges of a football stadium. Nearly everything in between is empty. So you are a cloud of mostly empty atoms, sitting on another cloud of mostly empty atoms. Why don't they just pass through each other? The main answer is the electromagnetic force. The outer edge of every atom is a cloud of negatively charged electrons. When the electrons in your jeans get close to the electrons in the chair, they push back against each other, and a rule of quantum physics keeps electrons from crowding into the same state. That push is what you feel as "solid." The same force does almost everything else that keeps the world in one piece. It binds electrons to the nucleus of every atom. It forms the chemical bonds that link atoms into molecules. It holds the two strands of your DNA together. It lets a gecko walk up a glass window. And it is strong. Two protons push each other apart with a force about a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than the gravity pulling them together. A small fridge magnet lifts a paper clip against the gravity of the entire Earth. Here is the surprising part. In quantum physics, the electromagnetic force is carried by photons. The same particles that make up light. In my book I put it this way: "All matter is being held together by light. Light is the glue that holds all things together." The Bible says this about Christ: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." I find it interesting that physics points to an analogous kind of glue. Something unseen, holding every atom of the world in place, every second. What does it mean that the force holding you together is carried by the same thing that lets you see? More in the first reply. 👉👉👉

Have you noticed that almost everything in your life has to be recharged? Your phone dies by evening. Your car needs gas. A ball rolled across the floor slows down and stops. Even you need breakfast. Everything we know runs down unless something keeps feeding it. Light doesn't. Turn on a flashlight and the batteries power the bulb. But once the light leaves the bulb, it needs nothing else. No engine pushes it. Here is why. Light is made of an electric field and a magnetic field, and each one keeps creating the other. You use this principle every day. A wireless charging pad works because a changing magnetic field produces an electric push in a coil inside your phone. In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell worked out that the reverse is also true. A changing electric field produces a magnetic field. Put those together. The changing electric field makes a magnetic field, which makes an electric field, which makes a magnetic field, over and over. The wave carries itself. When Maxwell calculated how fast that wave would travel, the answer matched the measured speed of light. On a dark autumn night you can see the Andromeda galaxy with your bare eyes. That faint smudge is light that has crossed empty space for trillions of miles. It spreads out and grows dimmer with distance, but nothing had to keep it going. As I wrote in The Author of Light: "Once a light beam is let loose in the vacuum of space, it will travel forever with no additional energy input." And then: "Just like light is self-sustaining, God is self-sustaining as He requires no additional or outside energy source to exist. God persists forever without change." Everything else in creation runs on borrowed energy. God borrows from no one. Moses saw a picture of this in the desert: "the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed." Exodus 3:2 When he asked God's name, the answer was "I AM THAT I AM." Exodus 3:14 You and I run down. We need sleep, food and grace every single day. The One who gives them never runs low. This is one of 18 parallels between light and God in my book. What else did God build into a single beam of light? More in the first reply. 👉👉👉

Have you ever seen the Sun? You might think so. But you have never seen the Sun as it is right now. Light is the fastest thing in the universe, about 186,000 miles every second. Fast, but not instant. So everything you look at, you see a little in the past. A friend across the room, you see about 10 billionths of a second late. The Moon, as it was about 1.3 seconds ago. The Sun, as it was about 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. If the Sun suddenly went dark, it would keep shining in your sky for over 8 minutes. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun, as it was more than 4 years ago. Some of the starlight reaching your eyes tonight left its star before Columbus sailed. So the night sky is not a snapshot of the present. It is a stack of messages from different moments in history, all arriving at your eye at once. Astronomers use this every day. The farther out a telescope looks, the further back in time it sees. The James Webb Space Telescope has photographed galaxies as they were when the universe had just formed. And the oldest light of all is still arriving. After the universe began, it cooled enough for light to travel freely. That light has been crossing space ever since. The expansion of space has stretched its waves so far that it now arrives as microwaves, from every direction in the sky. It is called the cosmic microwave background. A small part of the static on an old analog TV came from it. So light is not only how we see. It is a record. Every beam carries a report of where it came from and when it left. An ancient poet wrote about the sky long before anyone knew any of this: "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge." In my book I wrote that the laws of creation "convey a message that is being broadcast throughout the universe twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week." If the oldest light in the universe is still delivering its message, who is the message from? More in the first reply. 👉👉👉

Have you ever wondered how a movie gets from a server hundreds of miles away to your TV in a few seconds? For most of the trip, it rides on light. The backbone of the internet is made of glass fibers about as thin as a human hair. A laser at one end flashes on and off billions of times per second. Each flash is a tiny piece of your movie, your email or your video call. Cables full of these fibers lie on the ocean floor. They carry most of the internet traffic between continents. And one strand doesn't carry just one stream. Engineers send many colors of light down the same fiber at once, and each color carries its own separate stream of data. They don't get in each other's way. Here is where it gets stranger. A beam of light can also be twisted as it travels, like a corkscrew. It can twist once, twice, three times, and so on. Each amount of twist is a different pattern that can carry its own information. Mario Krenn of the University of Vienna's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information put it this way: "The Orbital Angular Momentum OAM of light is theoretically unbounded, meaning that one has, in theory, an unlimited amount of different distinguishable states in which light can be encoded." In theory, no upper limit. As I wrote in The Author of Light: "A single light beam has the capacity to transmit an infinite number of conversations at once." And: "The restriction to accessing the infinite data-handling capacity of light is due to the limitations of our technology, not the limitations of light." Scripture says this about God: "Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit." Psalm 147:5 Isaiah said it too: "his understanding no one can fathom." Isaiah 40:28 God is infinite in knowledge and wisdom. This is one of 18 parallels between light and God in my book. If one beam of light has room for an infinite number of conversations at once, what does that say about the One who made it? More in the first reply. 👉👉👉

Have you ever wondered what holds everything together? In this video I take you from the edge of a galaxy all the way down to a single atom to show you how it works, and what it may say about the One "in whom all things hold together." 👉👉👉 That's one of 18 parallels between light and God in my book, The Author of Light. Plain English, no math: amazon.com/Author-Light-Reve…