The Second Sun
"The PHOTONIC DRUG is the best Nootropic: it's measured in LUMENS instead of MILLIGRAMS." With this formula, Isochroma treated light not as mood but as dose. Lumens, colour temperature and CRI became parameters of an environment that was continuously administered. Elsewhere he wrote: "Yes, more lights! Light is Life and Life is Light." Body and brain, he argued, were built for permanently brilliant white light. This quarrel with light had not begun in his living space. On Doom9 he had already traced the point at which decoders and renderers or graphics drivers clipped luminance and colour information; on AVSForum he simultaneously observed and archived the development of self-emissive OLED displays. By 2008 he was arguing in the same logic on a cannabis forum about CFL lighting for plants: 23 W at 5,000 K for vegetative growth, 26 W at 2,700 K for flowering, T4 rather than T5 tubes because of higher intensity, and the distinction between lumen output measured in an integrating sphere before reflector losses and the light actually arriving at the target surface. What there still appeared as a question of complete video signal or plant-appropriate light output later became the question of whether a dwelling also supplied its occupants with an incomplete daylight signal.
In May 2009, a new Reef Central user named Isochroma opened the thread "Metal Halide Safety?". He was considering an unshielded 20,000 K lamp and did not ask whether it was dangerous in general, but about specific modes of failure: had other users seen the outer glass envelope shatter or the inner arc tube explode? Which lamp type, ballast and burning orientation were involved? Replies distinguished single-ended and double-ended lamps and warned that particular types lacked UV shielding. There is no direct link to his domain; alias, timing and subject make the attribution highly probable. In any case, the post shows that the later metal-halide escalation did not arise from ignorance of material risk. Explosion, UV radiation and circuit conditions had already been queried as technical parameters.
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"This is how a city should look at night!" In the Lighting-Gallery thread The Beauty of Mercury Vapor Streetlighting, Isochroma placed a night scene from the 1991 anime You're Under Arrest beside a photograph of Tokyo from space. The blue-green clarity of older Japanese mercury-vapour streetlights seemed to him akin to moonlight and starlight; the orange of sodium lighting, by contrast, dry and depleted. Later he wrote: "Sodium is ugly. It looks just like it tastes in my food: salty, dehydrating, dried-up." Anime from the 1980s and 1990s became an image archive of a disappearing lighting world.
Twelve 6,500 K CFLs totalling 276 W and 19,200 lm formed the Compact Fluorescent Spiral Galaxy Version 12 documented on Lighting-Gallery. Joined through Y-splitters, they formed an approximately spherical source and ran for eight hours a day in his bedroom. Isochroma did not want broad, diffuse brightness but a "DENSE, SUNLIKE source": divergent rays, deep shadows and the spatial plasticity of a small sun. He called the construction a "tiny quasi-spherical metaemitter" that, like an organism made of redundant cells, could grow and shrink. In the evening he switched the Galaxy off; a red 7 W Christmas bulb and a shielded incandescent remained. By January 2010 he had expanded the Galaxy to sixteen lamps, 368 W and 25,600 lm. When Isochroma published the Naturalistic Synthetic Light Environment in 2011, he was not merely proposing a future plan. He was turning an apparatus already tested in his bedroom into a general theory of habitable brightness. He calculated the minimum for circadian efficacy as 385 W of 6,500 K CFL light in a 16 × 14 foot room. The earlier Spiral Galaxy thus became the prototype of a threshold that almost no ordinary home reached and that he nevertheless treated as a minimum condition of functional perception. Another documented installation used four 42 W CFLs, two 23 W CFLs, two 30 W LEDs and several smaller units, all linked through Y-splitter trees; two of the CFLs were shifted to 12,000 K with blue transparent film.
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In a winter Reddit comment, Isochroma sat at 9:17 p.m. beneath the "Power of God", a 220 W cluster of 6,500 and 7,500 K lamps: "It's been pitch-black outside for three hours but it's Summertime in my room. Summer forever. All eternity. My Circadian system lives on the Equator and my body lives on the 49th Parallel. Better living through Lumens." The artificial day ran for twelve hours. In the evening came the complete reversal: all CFLs off, only a red LED left on, the display channels driven to gamma zero through a self-written Nvidia script, driver version 84.21 and no later one because later versions no longer allowed blue and green channels to be completely suppressed, LCD brightness at zero because of the backlight leak a panel still emitted at black. "I can feel the effects of my lighting switched off in minutes." Three to four hours later he went to bed and fell asleep immediately. The protocol followed the photobiology of the suprachiasmatic nucleus and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells and was at least partly testable against iPRGC research. Later research on light and human circadian rhythms did not confirm the protocol as a whole, but did confirm the importance of the parameters he persistently controlled: intensity, spectrum, timing and duration.
As the number of lamps increased, the splitter tree developed problems of weight and mutual shading. Eventually, the structure would become a "giant heatmaking mercury-bomb waiting to fall on my head". Isochroma wanted to replace the "piecemeal monstrosity" with a "real Mercury Bomb": a 1,000 W metal-halide lamp at 10,000 K whose arc tube burned at around 900 °C and contained 168 mg of mercury. He himself described the fact that such lamps could occasionally explode and fill a room with mercury vapour. Isochroma also loved the material: "I love old Vacuum-tube technology. Especially the beautiful Mercury Gas in Glass ones." He described spiral fluorescent tubes and short, thick metal-halide arc tubes in which droplets of mercury rolled with a ringing sound. LEDs, by contrast, appeared to him as short-lived plastic goods. "Those who want Ultimate Light must every day all day take the Ultimate Risk", he wrote. Since everyone had to die anyway, he asked whether the risk might not be worth the strongest nootropic lighting effect. His higher ideal was the sulfur lamp — "unaffordable and nearly unavailable and noisy due to its motor" — while metal halide remained attainable. He had cited the safety data himself.
