From an oil lamp to a band structure

In my grandmother’s house, a rush-wick oil lamp burned on the table and almost never went out. As a child I would sit beside it — trimming the wick, watching the flame grow and shrink, burning small things just to see how they changed. Later I learned some of this had names: a flame test, materials showing themselves through color.

But it never started as science. It started because a child wanted to know why.

I’m still doing the same thing today. The questions are larger, the tools more complex — physics, computation, AI — but underneath it is the same small flame, and the same simple wish to understand. A band structure is, in the end, another way of asking what a material will do when you push on it — a more careful version of holding something to the light and watching how it answers.

This is a first note by the lamp. More to come.