More light than heat

 Incandescence

One of the primary reasons we try to educate ourselves, when you get right down to it, is to be more efficient. Since the invention of the light bulb, for example, we've made it more efficient, brighter, cooler, more powerful, with less heat and more light. It's an apt metaphor for the human brain as well. The longer we wallow in ignorance about any topic, be it religion Vs spirituality; sexual preference Vs gender orientation; political expediency Vs traditional, conservative, fear-driven reaction, we, too, expend more heat than light. This is where education comes in, the active pursuit of enLIGHTenment, the restless need to know what is true, or at least what passes for truth in a transitional world. There's a reason cartoon balloons use light bulbs to indicate ideas, awakenings, understanding. "Let there be light," it says in Genesis. This is not just the warm, illuminating rays from the sun that allow us to read those cartoons, or do the crossword. That light is more efficiency inside our brains, the opening of doors revealing vistas unimagined in the darkest corners. They are, finally, the rays that show us there's much more work to be done, more efficiency to be sought.
In my own attempt to educate myself, returning to school after many years, I've come to believe that people differ in two basic ways: There are those who prefer sunrise, with its promise of the new, and the fresh and the different; there are those who prefer sunset, with its fading rays, and settled reality, and dimming chance of disturbing revelation to disrupt that which is tenaciously held.
Incandescence is slowly giving way to florescence, the more efficient use of power to produce light. From the French word for flower, or blossom, florescence is the sunrise, the acceptance of new possibility every new dawn.