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Our 1/4 inch cube of air would fit nicely tucked just out of sight inside this orchid. All 1,200,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of it. And all the energies and information would continue to flow without the slightest interruption to this flower's serenity.
[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.”]
We’ve considered all the energy and “stuff” that’s passing through our little quarter-inch cube of air, but what about what’s actually inside the cube itself? The air? What if we could capture our cube of air inside a little cube of glass? And take an inventory? What would we have?
As best I can figure it, if we assume that our cube of air is at “standard atmosphere” conditions, which are near sea level at about 59 degrees Fahrenheit, there are roughly 1.2 billion-billion air molecules bouncing around in there. That’s 1,200,000,000,000,000,000 molecules. I’m serious. Though I may be off by an order of magnitude or two. They are mostly N2 and O2. About 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. The rest is rarer gases and dust and all those aromatics I mentioned earlier. Plus a little H2O in vapor form. The number of individual atoms would be, of course, more than double that big number.
And every atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons with a cloud of electrons whizzing around it. The particles in the nucleus are held together by forces that are much, much stronger than the electromagnetic force or gravity. These particles mediate these forces, the Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces, by exchanging even more exotic particles. And the electrons are held in their orbitals by exchanging even more photons with the particles in the nucleus.
These massive energies inside the nucleus are what are released in a nuclear reactor or in a nuclear explosion. Getting about two pounds of uranium nuclei to disintegrate all at once is what happens in a garden variety atomic explosion. What makes the uranium special is not that it has so much more energy, it’s just that it’s so unstable. So when you bring a couple pounds of it into close proximity, the naturally decaying nuclei send out enough high-energy particles to trigger the decay of more unstable nearby nuclei. A chain reaction starts and, well, if left unchecked, will release a truly vast amount of energy, as heat and light and all matter of exotic radiation.
The actual energy would be about the same as in any two pound mass of anything, even air. It would just be damn near impossible to release it. But the point is, the energy is in there.
And keep in mind that all of these particles are incredibly small. So small, in fact, that they nearly wink out of space altogether. In fact, some of them might. An electron for example, according to quantum mechanics, only exists as a cloud of probabilities until it interacts with something. The same thing could be true for all of these particles. Including all those photons. Each only comes into existence at the, and for the, moment of interaction. Before that, and after that, they are just “likelihoods” utterly without substantive existence.
Consider that quantum mechanics says that atoms, and their particles, do not each have their own individual history. And that photons are not limited to a specific volume in space or time. Or time? Yeah, or time.
This is science’s view of the cube. Or a glimpse of it. Complex. Incredibly so. Dense with information. Maybe infinitely so. And holding energies that are difficult to imagine.
Breathe it all in. Meditate on these “facts.” Exhale.
We’re not quite finished.
— continued (Next: The space between)
To the naked eye this is just a tiny, nearly featureless, white chip of shell. At 20X magnification we can see it is the very core of a sea shell, worn down and laid bare. You'll find these curves and spirals and counter spirals repeat across the universe. The same beauty captured by our most powerful telescopes. The subject of this image is less than 1/8 inch across. Imagine its origins. And its path to these pixels.
[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.”]
But there are other things besides myriad photons inside our little cube. Dust will also have the effect of diffusing the light. The photons hit a dust particle and new photons are sent out in random directions with the energy that matches the apparent color of the dust. The water vapor in the cube will be doing the same thing. If you look out your window, and are lucky enough to be able to see pretty far, you’ll see this effect clearly. Painters call it “aerial perspective.” It helps make sunsets so beautiful.
But visible light is not the only thing passing through our quarter-inch cube. Far from it. There are also energies all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light just happens to be a narrow band about right in the middle. Our eyes came about to make best use of this narrow range because they naturally developed to detect the strongest of the sun’s radiation available at the Earth’s surface. And in the center of the visible range is the strongest of the sun’s frequencies, at about 550 nanometers, along between about green and yellow. And our eyes are most sensitive to that, trailing off to either side, out through red on one side and blue-violet on the other. The radiation beyond those colors, we can’t “see”, but it’s there.
If we consider all the information of lower energy and frequency than visible light, well, there is an entire new universe of information. Just past visible red is the range of energies known as infrared. We feel this as heat. If you had an infrared camera, the room around you would look a lot different. You’d be glowing orange and yellow. Across the room the light bulb would be even brighter.
And all that heat energy is moving around the room trying to reach some sort of equilibrium. That little cube of air in front of you is being jostled by the effects of the heat energy coming off of your body. All around you, the air is being warmed by you. As it warms it causes the air molecules to vibrate a little more and as they do they dance further apart, causing the air to become slightly less dense. As it does, this less dense, lighter air moves up, being displaced by denser heavier air around it. This swirling, tumbling of air happens all around you.
As the heat dissipates, it passes through our cube of air and stirs it.
If it’s not stirring your spirit, hang on. The soup thickens.
— continued (Next: Are your possessions evaporating?)
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.)
This was the only shell we picked up that day. No bigger than a small pea. Tiny, white and, to the naked eye, featureless. But under closer examination, a new universe emerged. Perfectly etched spirals, all reflecting the perfect proportions. The "divine proportion," it has been called. This image is about 1/8 inch across. The shell's perfection is staggering.
[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.”]
You see, this cube of ours is just a tiny little thing. But to jump straight off the edge, let’s start with visible light. You must come to understand and appreciate the raw amount of visual information that is passing through that space at every given point in time. You can walk around and look through the cube from every possible angle and you will see that all the visual information from across the room, or across the city, or if you are outside or near a window at night, across the universe; it’s all traveling through the cube. And it is all traveling through the cube all the time. Constantly and continually. And utterly uninterrupted.
Now to demonstrate the sheer mass of data there, you can take a powerful telescope up to the cube and you will be able to see great detail coming back from great distances. If you imagine a beautiful photograph of another galaxy, you must accept that if the cube is within direct sight of that galaxy, then all that same information is passing through the cube. Right now.
If you take a microscope up to the cube and can see the finest detail in a bit of cloth or a dust particle, or beautiful pollen particle floating by, you must accept that all of that data is flying through the cube constantly.
If you arranged a thousand cameras around one side of the cube and they all took an exposure at the same exact instant, they would obviously all capture a complete photograph, through the cube, of the other side of the room. None would be starved for data, even though they all required that all of the information they recorded had to have transited the cube at exactly the same instant.
Take one of those dentist mirrors, the little round mirror on a short wand, and put it into the cube and move it all around to see in every direction. It’s all there; nothing is missing. And it’s all there even when the mirror isn’t. It’s that visual light that, in fact, allows you to see the mirror, or I should say, to see the frame and back of the mirror.
So it should be clear then that all the possible visual information in the reality all around this cube is constantly streaming through it in every direction. This information is in the form of visible light, which is made up of photons, tiny wave-particle packets of electromagnetic energy that are utterly massless(at rest) and move at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Now, I know, all too well I’m afraid, that everything I’ve just told you about the actual photon is completely incomprehensible. The ideas are too foreign, the numbers are both too large and too small. The sheer amount of photons that are moving through that little cube at any moment is utterly unbelievable. But it is happening. Our temporal reality science knows it and guarantees it to be true.
Now imagine all the one-quarter-inch cubes of air in the room and try and realize that they are all experiencing the same traffic in photons. There is an utterly impossible amount of visual information moving around you. It all flies by at the speed of light and does not interfere with any of the other information moving through the same space at the same time. But as they say, there it is.
Next, we’ll look inside, at the contents of the cube.
–continued (Next: Some of these photons show their color.)
