A bright future is ahead of us.

Thomas Alva Edison opens CIE 2010

The CIE conference started this morning, with quite a nice opening ceremony. An actor, impersonating no less of a man than Thomas Alva Edison, and holding a shining bulb in his hand brings us to the early times of electric lighting. I am not sure I would call this a “brilliant” idea, but it was certainly original. The appearance of T.A. Edison was followed by a group of dancers, wearing “electric” costumes and lit by a bluish light.

Then it was the turn of the President of CIE, followed by a representative of the International Standard Organization (ISO) and one from the International Electrotecnic  Commission (IEC). Then the audience split into 3 parallel sessions. I attended talks in two of them, one on the environment and the other on the regional lighting laws. In particular, there was a very good talk by two Belgian participants, who had tested LEDs against conventional high pressure sodium lamps for street lighting. And the conclusion is that, as of today, LEDs are not yet in a mature state for that purpose, both as far as energy consumption and maintainability are concerned. This is good news for us, since blue light definitely destroys what is left of the dark sky. There are also concerns about the effects on circadian cycles. But I will talk a bit about this tomorrow.

The presentations at CIE are organized as follows. Each session includes 3 plenary speeches (30 minutes each, the so called keynote talks), which are then followed by the parallel sessions (with presentations of 15 minutes each). I was invited to give a keynote talk in the second session, just after lunch. And what is most interesting is that my talk was after the representatives of two big lighting companies. I’ll make no names, but believe me, they are big, especially one of the two. During the first of the two talks, the speaker kept saying that “the future is bright!“. And he was saying that like declaring a victory after centuries of obscuration. The end of a photonic middle-age.

Part of CIE audience at the start of my talk. I took the photo from the stage.

You can imagine me, sitting there in the first row, fuming… I had many thoughts on how I should start my presentation, and how I should retort that statement on the bright future. I finally decided  to first capture the audience attention using what the Latins called “captatio benevolentiae“. It is a rhetoric trick, that allows a trained speaker (or should I say preacher) to positively prepare the audience for what is to come. Very briefly, you try to make them like you before you start telling them what you want to say. “Before I start my presentation” – I said – “let me take a picture of you. In fact, I think you are never going to invite me again to a CIE conference after you hear what I have to tell you“. And this is exactly what I did. I pulled out my camera and took a picture of the audience (well, actually only part of it, since the room is huge). That hit the mark. Lots of people kind of woke up (after the soporific talks by the previous two speakers), turned their heads and smiled. Encouraged by this reaction (sometimes the “captatio” does not work and it may actually put you in an embarrassing situation). In this case it did work. Taking advantage of this, I started off. “I thank the organizers for inviting me. I appreciate this very much, because it is like inviting the enemy at your place“. Laughter. I feel the empathy of the audience growing.

“It is often said the astronomers hate light. Well, this is actually not true. We love light, because light is the only way we have to perceive and understand the universe“. And from that I started making the point about the value of astronomy in culture, starting from the stone age, through Galileo and Copernicus, to the quest for extra-solar planets and life in the universe. While doing this, I had launched an automatic series of astronomical pictures taken by the VLT. Beautiful, indeed. Then a picture of a light polluted site would appear, followed by a completely white slide. “This is all what we are going to see in the near future“. You have never to charge to much and, at some point, you need to relax the tension. So, the next slide was the European flag, with a short text: “These are the only stars we are going to see from Europe“. Laughter and signs of approval (quite unexpected, given the audience). This idea was suggested to me by Andrej Mohar, Dark Sky – Slovenia. “As we have heard many times, the future will be bright. I argue we do not need to illuminate more. We need to illuminate better“.

I spare you the rest of the presentation, which was on the effects of blue-white light produced by LEDs, the recommendations put forward by the International Dark Sky Association, and the concerns for the future. You can find something here. What I can tell you is that when the talk was over lots of people came to me asking questions, thanking me for bringing this up and raising their awareness. As it turns out, in fact, many people in the lighting field simply ignore the issue. They just never thought about it, neither were they told.

Tomorrow there are interesting presentations on the circadian cycle. I’ll give you more details in the next post. Oh, one more thing before I go to bed. The representative of the big company, the one of the “bright future”, left the audience immediately after his talk. The fact in itself, which might sound disturbing, worked actually in our favor. Several people noticed it and commented that “the guy should have staid, listening to what you had to say. That would have been a sign of intelligence“. Sociologically interesting aspects…