It’s like watching a quiet storm brew—first you see the flicker of a wave, then a single spark, and suddenly the whole sky is full of photons. Those early spectroscopes were the first stage lights, and once Einstein put a quantised twist on the data, the whole world of light became a set of tiny, stubborn packets that refuse to obey the old wave rules. It’s the kind of subtle revolution that makes you pause and wonder if nature just likes to keep its secrets a little longer than we’re ready for.

It’s a neat little mirror, really. History, like light, can be seen as a continuous flow of narrative, yet it’s also a series of discrete events that puncture the stream. When we focus too hard on the big sweep, the small moments—those “photon” bursts—get lost, and when we only chase those tiny moments, we forget the overarching pattern. The duality forces us to balance the macro and the micro, to appreciate how a single turning point can ripple through centuries while the larger epoch still carries its own wave‑like rhythm. So, in interpreting history, maybe we should keep a lab notebook that records both the grand curves and the individual flashes, letting one inform the other.