Since the beginning of scientific inquiry the nature of light has played a vital role in our understanding of the physical world. Physicists have marveled at the dual nature of light as both corpuscle and wave; we have harnessed the remarkable coherent properties of light through the use of lasers; and the quantum mechanics of the interaction of photons with matter continue to provide fascinating avenues of basic research. In essence, any alteration of electromagnetism, the fundamental interaction overning atomic, molecular and condensed matter physics, will lead to fundamentally new phenomena in all these areas.