Every culture, on every continent, tells a tale of a quest. The quest for El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Ponce de Leon’s quest for the Fountain of Youth. Alexander the Great’s quest for the Water of Life.
Though from different times and different cultures, these stories reflect fundamental desires: endless abundance, eternal life, healing, and transformation from an ordinary existence to something extraordinary.
Perhaps the most famous quest is that of the grail. In Arthurian legend, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table see the grail in a mystical vision and are inspired to embark on a quest for a sacred cup that would heal a wasteland and restore the kingdom.
And yet, this legend, exported around the world in Western cinema more than a dozen times in the past century as both drama and farce (you can decide for yourself how to classify Transformers: The Last Knight), is not the real origin story of the grail. The first references date back to Celtic mythology, which alludes to a mythical cauldron of abundance that can heal, feed, or even resurrect. This Celtic vessel didn’t merge into Arthurian legend until centuries later, when medieval writers transformed the communal cauldron into the more individualistic grail quest that we know today—though even then, the grail’s power was fundamentally about healing and restoration.
Unlike other mythical quests in search of wealth (El Dorado) or immortality (the Fountain of Youth), the cauldron—and the grail—were about the health of a community. Little wonder, then, that modern science has inherited this ancient narrative template. Research endeavors are invariably framed as quests, with seemingly every fifth science story quoting a researcher purportedly searching for a holy grail. In many ways, the planet and its people are sick and broken, and these scientific holy grails offer pathways to unity, health, and sustainability.
This issue shares some of the most exciting holy grails being pursued in photonics today—many the culmination of generations of research, and the adventures of a lifetime. A feature story delves into optical computing, which began as a scientific quest, but has become a societal holy grail, as today’s AI-hungry computing needs far outstrip the capacity of traditional electronic computing. We learn about upconverting nanoparticles, tiny alchemists that transform low-energy light into high-energy healing. And we see that smart glasses—which seemed like folly only 10 years ago—have become a new and worthy quest with a mission that includes eliminating communication barriers among speakers of different languages as well as hearing- and sight-impaired people.
In the Arthurian version, only the worthiest knights achieve the grail. In science, it has less to do with virtue, and more to do with perseverance (and usually funding). The 21st Century has achieved some significant holy grails, including the first detected gravitational wave in 2015, which opened a new era in astronomy; and discovery of the Higgs-Boson “God” particle at CERN in 2012, a foundational quest of particle physics. In both cases, those discoveries did not prove to be an end destination, but rather a starting point for further questions.
Perhaps that’s the hallmark of a true scientific quest: The recognition that achieving the grail is just another starting point for a new adventure.
Gwen Weerts, Editor-in-chief
