Recently, two objects, one incredibly small and the other gargantuan in, scale caught my attention.

The first, a giant star named in the lingo of astronomers, WOH G64, was highlighted by one of my favourite science writers, Dennis Overbye from the New York Times.

This giant, the first star outside the Milky Way to have its picture taken is 2,000 times larger than our sun, and was found in a small galaxy orbiting our Milky Way and a long, long way away — 160,000 light years to be precise.

Based on its red appearance surrounded by a spinning corona of gas and energy, this giant is probably running out of energy to sustain fusion and thus its source of expansile force.

With the result that sometime in the next million years this star will collapse directly into a dark hole or come to its end in a spectacular supernova explosion scattering its elements throughout the neighborhood with the core imploding into a black hole or neutron star.

To see that giant star required ganging data together collected from four separate eight-meter telescopes to create a much larger virtual telescope with the requisite resolution to see this dying giant.

The picture is yet another reminder of the cycle of birth, interims and endings of stars, and the possible birth of new stars by gravitational shaping and compression of nearby hydrogen clouds together with the leftover elements from the death of earlier stars.

That’s perspective on a grand scale.

What about the other end to the scale — the scale of the very tiny?

Recently, a friend brought to my attention an article in Space.com written by Victoria Atkinson who highlighted an extraordinary image of a single photon of light.

That picture closes a loop for me because, in 1905, Albert Einstein — based on his analysis of the photoelectric effect — concluded that light was composed of photons.

That was a revolutionary claim at the time and eventually led to a Nobel Prize for Einstein in 1921.

In a far more reluctant fashion, Max Planck adopted the quantal nature of blackbody radiation for his mathematical analysis of blackbody radiation to bring his equations in line with the experimental data.

Einstein’s and Planck’s adoption of the quantal nature of light and heat energy were to form the basis of quantum physics.

Prior to that time, visible light, and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum — so brilliantly studied by Faraday and Maxwell in the 1800s — were considered as waveforms but not quantal in nature.

But what is a quanta? A particle? If so, how large and what are the properties of a quantum?

Here is where a recent image of a photon of light comes in: It is the first image of a photon of light.

Getting that image required fancy mathematics, well beyond my knowledge.

The mathematical model for the photon depended on employing many complicated equations, which Ben Yuen and Angela Demetriadou, in a report for the University of Birmingham, published in November, simplified by introducing “imaginary numbers” (multiples of the impossible square root of -1).

This mathematical gimmick allowed Yuen and Demetriadou to simplify the equations and once done, the imaginary numbers, having served their purpose, were dispensed with.

The resulting simplified equations were then used to reveal an image of a photon emitted from the surface of a nanoparticle.

Photons or quanta are one aspect of light and other forms of radiation, all of which have waveform-like properties as well, which complicates the issue of the properties of light.

Nonetheless, this was a big step forward toward understanding the properties of photons of light, knowledge of which could be applied, as the authors suggest, for “optoelectronic devices, photochemistry, biosensors, and quantum communication.”

Here was yet another bridge to “reality” in quantum physics, which Einstein would appreciate. He was uncomfortable with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which stated that at the subatomic level, reality could only be stated in probabilistic terms — nerve a certainty.

The 2023 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, which readers can access on the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library website, hinted that Heisenberg might be wrong because one prize involved tracking electrons in real-time and the other corralled electrons to produce different colours.

Heisenberg was right in his day — there were no methods for “seeing” atoms, never mind, electrons. But these days the first fussy pictures of atoms have been seen and electrons tracked.

So, “certainty,” was only a hypothesis — useful in its time, but not a law for the ages.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Albert Einstein’s famous mistakes as well as his triumphs (Nov. 21, “Dr. Brown: Einstein: What he got right and wrong“). With this image of a photon — maybe he’s smiling now.

There you have it, two objects that range from a photon in size to a star emitting countless photons of light detected by a sophisticated array of telescopes, to see a star 2,000 times larger than our sun and nearing the end of its life, perhaps a million years later than the image we see.

Correction: In the article that appeared in the Dec. 5 edition of The Lake Report, entitled “Biology, physics, artificial intelligence and complexity,” the time when the earliest primates took hold should read 50,000,000 years, not 50,000 years.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.