Near Trebizond on the south shore of the Black Sea there once lived a Circassian woman whose husband was a powerful shaman. This shaman knew how to change himself into a donkey and would usually pass his daylight hours in this form because it was better for tax purposes. But for part of the night it was his custom to voyage outside the earth's atmosphere and drift free of gravity in the blackness of space.
At that time there were many shamans among the Circassians and since the tax burden imposed by the Great Khan of the Turks was severe it was not uncommon for a shaman to assume an animal shape to avoid having to pay. Doing so was found to work as a cure for lower back pain as well, perhaps the only thing, in the view of these shamans, that really does work.
The Circassian woman would rise early in the morning and brew strong coffee for her husband, who liked to enjoy his coffee in human shape before he reverted to being a donkey and went outside to eat thistles. One morning while he was drinking coffee with his wife, the husband remarked that during the night he had traveled halfway to the moon and had counted the specks of sunlight in a cubic mile of space.
The woman understood that it is mostly always day out in space because nothing much gets in the way of the sunlight and she knew that sunlight comes in small bundles of vibration, and it did not seem overly remarkable that her husband had counted them. So she asked how many bits of sunlight there were in a cubic mile and he said "a mole." Among the Circassians at that time, this was a way of referring to the number 1023. "I added up their frequencies," he continued, "and found that the average was 1017 radians a minute."
"In that case," replied the woman, "the sunlight energy in a cubic mile is the same as if you had one sole sparkle vibrating at 1040 a minute." The woman fetched a bowl of dates from the cupboard and chose one for her husband that had food energy (we would say 5 Calories) exactly equal to the energy of a bit of light with that frequency. And as the man ate it, he reflected that it was equal in energy to the sunlight in a cubic mile of space.
Note: the energy in a single tingle, or quantum sparkle, of light is proportional to its frequency of vibration and the proportion is as FIVE FOOD CALORIES is to the frequency of 1040 per minute.
This ratio is ordinarily stated in other units of energy and frequency but it is the ratio that matters—it is a universal thing about light—and not the units used to express it. The ratio is ordinarily called h-bar.