The darkness in light

Reddish-yellow edges overlap blue-cyan edges to form green.

In looking at Goethe's take on light yet again, one readily sees why all the action in reality resides at the edges wherever two or more differing environments come in contact with each other with the resulting interaction often becoming unpredictable in ways boggling the mind. In rereading Physorg's The Dark Side of Light, the interconnectedness of reality comes into play due to the fact light, like all particles, is both a wave and a particle, thus giving rise to properties connected to not only the notion of shadow and darkness in light but also to recursion and its connect to the fractal, nature's journey to forever that never ends. 

Goethe's symmetric colour wheel with associated symbolic qualities (1809)

Recently, researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Bristol in the UK have discovered another unusual property of light – or, more accurately, the darkness within light. As the researchers explain, natural light fields are threaded by lines of darkness, which create optical vortices that appear as black points within the light. The group has modeled this phenomenon, and found that the lines of darkness exhibit fractal properties with Brownian (random) characteristics. Further, the characteristics of these optical vortices suggest universal properties, which could help connect different areas of physics.

It gets better.

When investigating the lines of darkness further, the researchers found that they exhibit scale invariance. In other words, the vortices look the same no matter how much you zoom out – they are fractals. Lead author Kevin O’Holleran of the University of Glasgow said that, while he and his colleagues suspected vortex lines to exhibit fractal properties, they were quite surprised to find that the fractality was of a Brownian nature.

Light and dark spectra—when coloured edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results. 

Because Fractals are universal and self similar (ferns, nautilus, ocean waves, rivers, trees etc.) and Browinian Motion is a chaotic process (Random Walks etc., etc.), the dark light random vortices/fractals constructs in light have unusual properties, i.e. "(the ratio of vortex lines to loops and their scale invariance) are very similar to the properties of cosmic strings, according to the cosmic string lattice model."

Simulation of the Brownian motion of a large particle, analogous to a dust particle, that collides with a large set of smaller particles, analogous to molecules of a gas, which move with different velocities in different random directions.