Try and imagine all the random motions that brought every grain of sand on this beach to its location in this picture. That's about the scale of motions happening to the molecules of air inside our 1/4 inch cube. Every second. The ordinary is starting to get pretty extraordinary, isn't it?
[This chapter continues the “assignment” from my Spirit Guide, See Do, to examine the complexities of our mundane reality. The specific construct given me to examine is a hypothetical cube ¼ inch on a side, floating in the air about a foot in front of my face. These meditations on our temporal reality will be followed by an examination of “See Do reality.”]
And in addition to the heat energy that continually comes into the cube from various directions and the natural air movements in the room, there is this little thing called Brownian Motion. This is the natural random movement of molecules in a gas or liquid. It is much more energetic then you might expect. The molecules are all moving all over the cube all the time. The little vibrations of heat energy send them scattering constantly.
A dramatic way to demonstrate this is to take a single human hair(even an eyelash) and burn it in a candle flame. Notice how quickly the entire space of the room, or of the house, has clear evidence of some of that very distinctive smell. It is almost unbelievable how quickly it moves. And remember, our sense of smell is not very sensitive at all. There are species of moth that can smell the pheromones of a potential mate at a distance of twenty miles. And track it to its source. There are probably some of those in our little cube too.
But everything in the room is emitting molecules of its own material into the air all the time. If you walk around and smell everything, you’ll find that everything has a “smell”. Now you usually can’t smell it unless you get very, very close, but those molecules are sloughing off just the same.
If something does “smell” or have an obvious odor, like a candle, perfume, deodorant, soap, shampoo, flowers, just to name some obvious things that might be around, it is because is has more volatile material in its make-up. Meaning that it is made of things that are more likely to evaporate into the air.
Anyway, all of these molecules are moving out through the room all the time. And with the very present help of Brownian Motion, you can be sure that our little cube is home to at least a little bit of everything that is in the room. And no doubt much that is beyond.
So there is at least a little of everything around you, everything within sight, right there at your fingertips. Is the “real” world beginning to blur a bit? Hang on, there’s more.
— continued (Next: the endless tsunami of radio info.)
This is a tiny fleck of embryonic coral. The photo is just 1/8 inch across. Those are grains of sand on its surface. Every individual cell wall of its growing form built this spiral. A wonder of nature, but to the eye it appears on the beach as a miniscule blank white chip. A typical beach may hold billions.
[This chapter continues the “assignment” from my Spirit Guide, See Do, to examine the complexities of our mundane reality. The specific construct given me to examine is a hypothetical cube ¼ inch on a side, floating in the air about a foot in front of my face. These meditations on our temporal reality will be followed by an examination of “See Do reality.”]
As light moves through the cube of air it completely ignores most of the material in the cube. Most of it. It doesn’t interact with the air molecules much at all. The air, which is mostly nitrogen and oxygen with a little water vapor, trace gases and some stuff we call dust, is mostly transparent to these photons. By transparent, I mean that they do not interact with the electrons around the nuclei of the oxygen and nitrogen atoms much at all.
For something to be “seen” by us, the atoms it is made of go through this little dance. I’ll try to explain it here in simple terms, but please forgive me if I reach out too far into technical la-la land. But this is how it is.
You see, first a photon enters or ‘hits” an outer electron’s cloud of probability in such a way as to bring the electron to a realized state. In this state, the electron absorbs the photon and jumps to a higher energy state. It’s important here to understand that it will only do this if the energy or “frequency” of the photon energy is in sync with the energy the electron would need to jump up to its next possible energy state. If the energies don’t match, the photon flies right by and nothing happens.
But if they match, the electron jumps up to a higher energy. With this higher energy electron, the atom now exhibits a higher energy. This higher energy shows by making the atoms jostle or wiggle a little bit. Actually I should say a little bit more, because all atoms are always jiggling, unless they are frozen at absolute zero.
This wiggling is what we think of as heat. And once the atom jiggles off a little, the electron falls back to its original lower energy state and sends out a new photon. This new photon is the same “frequency” as the wiggle. Which is just a little less than the energy of the original incoming photon. This new photon flies away at the usual speed of light in an entirely random direction. This photon, if we’re in the right place, hits our eye, and viola, we see something. And we see this something as having a color, because our eyes have little sensors that are tuned to detect photon energy of the very narrow band of energy we think of as visible light. How that tiny pulse in the back of our eye gets transformed into our coherent visual image of the world is a subject for another time.
Of course, in reality, the whole thing a lot more complex. And there is a whole lot more going on. A whole lot more. For example, to see an object as having a color, all the photons of the energy of that color are the ones that go through the process I just described. The others are absorbed and not re-radiated. In that case, those other photons are absorbed by the electron, and the atom expresses all of that new energy in its jiggling. The material just gets a little warmer. But you really already knew that. You just didn’t know you knew it. Black clothes are warmer. White are cooler.
All the original light plus a lot of new light, that’s right, these new photons were just created right there in front of you on the surfaces of everything in the room, all that light is now moving through the tiny cube in front of you.
And some of the air molecules in our little cube do interact with the light streaming through. Not many, but a few. That’s partly why we see a diffuse haze in air at a distance. That diffusion, you’ll notice, has a blue cast, because that’s the frequency of the energy that gets turned into a new photon during those somewhat rare interactions. If you go outside on a nice day and look up you’ll see proof. The sky is blue.
It gets better.
— continued (Next: The narrow energies we can see.)
