Tonight or tomorrow, millions of Americans will look up to see fireworks illuminating the night skies with showers of light. Fireworks are so wrapped up in the history and tradition of the Fourth of July that to celebrate without them—as some critics want us to do—would almost be to mark a different holiday and different country. 

Fireworks demand the viewer’s full attention. Their imminence and ephemerality allow us, for a moment, to cast aside our cares. Photos and film can’t capture the full sensory experience, which at its best brings fire and noise to a skillful perfection. No camera or recording device can recreate the bursts of multichromatic light piercing the darkness, the thunderclaps that prove sound is a pressure wave, the smell of burnt powder as it wafts overhead, and, most important, the sensation of being in a crowd.