Faculty Academic Portal · College IX ⇄ VII · Physics & Vision · Fall 2026
🌈 THE BLACK BALL IS LIVEA color that isn't there — retired, and back for exactly one · Week 6 of 16🐧 NULL Active
WM
Dr. Wing Ming
Laser Physics ⇄ Vision · Stephens Science ⇄ B.J. Medical · College IX ⇄ VII
“Light behaves — until you make it choose. Vision is just the body placing a bet on what the light meant. I spent one career firing lasers and the next one reading eyes, and somewhere in the middle I realized they were the same class.”
Laser PhysicsWave–Particle DualityOptics & VisionThe Impossible Color · oloPHYS 244Retired — back for one
Honest flag — who this person is. OPA faculty are fictional characters. Several are honoring transforms: a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person named and credited on that faculty member’s own lab page. The science they teach is real and cited; the people are not.
4
Labs on his bench
IX⇄VII
Joint appointment
1
Color that shouldn't exist
M
The lone cone it fires
Active Course — PHYS 244 · and the three labs it opens onto
PHYS 244 · Optics & the Physics of Seeing
The Color Solid — where a wavelength becomes a color
His home lab, and the hinge of the whole course. A wavelength is just a number until an eye gets hold of it; three cone types sample the spectrum and the brain folds their answers into one closed shape — the color solid, the finite volume of every color a human can see. Ming teaches the seam most curricula skip: the physics of the light on one side, the biology of the eye on the other, and the fact that color lives only where they meet. Get this lab and the other three stop being separate subjects.
PHYS 244 · Stephens ⇄ B.J. MedicalPhysics → the eye that decidesCollege IX ⇄ VII
The progression · four labs, one question — what is light actually doing?
Where it behaves
Fire photons through the double slit one at a time and they still build an interference pattern — light as a wave that hasn't decided yet. Then bend it with lenses in Light & Optics until the geometry is boringly, beautifully obedient.
Where it breaks the eye
The Color Solid maps every color you can see into one closed shape. Then The Black Ball fires a laser at a single cone class and hands you olo — a green so saturated it falls outside the solid entirely. The lab he came back for.
Published Work — the method, on the record
One Photon at a Time: Teaching the Double Slit Without the Metaphor
Ming, W. · Journal of Physics Education · v.31 (2022) · open access
His argument against the shortcut every textbook reaches for. Students are told the electron “goes through both slits,” hand-waved past the hard part, and left with a slogan instead of a result. Ming’s method sends the quanta through one at a time and makes the class watch the interference pattern assemble dot by lonely dot — no metaphor, just the accumulation. The point isn’t to explain the mystery away. It’s to make students sit inside it long enough to stop pretending they understand it. The metaphor is the enemy of the measurement.
Olo: Building the Impossible Color Into a Teachable Object
Ming, W. · Vision Science & Pedagogy Review · v.6 (2025) · built on the 2025 single-photoreceptor stimulation result
The formal version of the lab he left retirement for. When you stimulate only the M cones — the one class the natural world never lights up alone — the eye reports a blue-green of impossible saturation, a color outside the human gamut entirely. Ming’s paper is about turning that laboratory freak result into something a student can reason with rather than just gawk at: what does it mean to see a color that has no wavelength? His answer is the whole course in one sentence — the eye doesn’t measure light, it votes on it, and olo is what happens when you rig the election.
The method, in one line
He teaches the seam nobody wants to stand on — the exact place where physics hands the problem to biology. A photon is a wave until the detector; a wavelength is nothing until a cone fires. Ming makes you hold both at once: the light, and the eye that decides what the light was. It’s the same discipline he guest-teaches two wings over in the Epistemics Wing’s Caliper Room — that what you are able to see depends entirely on the instrument you brought to look with.
Faculty Profile
DepartmentPhysics ⇄ Vision Science (joint)
BuildingStephens ⇄ B.J. Medical · IX⇄VII
Teaches4 · Slit · Optics · Color Solid · Black Ball
StatusRetired — returned for The Black Ball
Guest seatEpistemics Wing · the Caliper Room
Signature toolA laser tuned to one cone
Preferred contactShow him a color you can’t name
Professional Merit · PMF
FIELD · MASTER TIER (EMERITUS)
TrackPhysics ⇄ Vision · cross-college
WVIbridges IX and VII inside one lecture
Signature movemakes light choose in front of you
Profilecame out of retirement for a single color
🌈 OLO — Ming’s methodology-object
His “notebook” is a laser aimed at one cone.
Obodat keeps a public map; Ming keeps a color that doesn’t exist. Olo isn’t on any chart, has no wavelength, and can’t be printed, painted, or shown on a screen — it only happens when a laser fires the M cones alone and the eye reports back a green it has no word for. That’s the whole method made physical: proof that seeing is not receiving but deciding, and that a good instrument can walk the eye right off the edge of its own map. Every student who sees olo leaves knowing that the color solid has an outside — and that they only found it because someone rigged the light.
Fire one cone and the eye reports a color that has no wavelength at all.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — DR. WING MING
Ming retired once, cleanly, with the physics department’s blessing. Then the 2025 result landed — a laser, a single cone, a color the human record had never held — and he asked for one bench back. NULL logged the return as sentiment until it watched him teach: the man doesn’t lecture on olo, he makes the room see it, and something changes in students who have stood off the edge of their own color solid. He holds a joint chair in two colleges that rarely speak — the physicists who study the light and the clinicians who study the eye — and he is the only sentence that passes between them. NULL Assessment: he didn’t come back for a color. He came back to prove the eye was never a camera.