You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get an idea, and you’re just waiting for the moment to write it down. Finally, just as the moment gets there, it’s hijacked by something else, another idea maybe, and now maybe that first idea isn’t so hot. Sad, sad.
I’ve been trying to write a post about photons. Actually, I’ve been tripping out on photons lately – don’t ask me why.
Photons, itty bitty, subatomic particles that travel in waves – you’ll never see one on its own. Too tiny, and too fleeting, a photon lives and dies at the speed of light (duh).
But you won’t see a photon until it hits something. Like your brand new Mazda CX-5, maybe, in that beautiful bright red color. A nice car that you would totally not see right there in the middle of the day if there wasn’t a light on it.
Darkness is the absence of light, right? If you’ve ever been in the pitch dark – I was in the wilds of Arizona on a cloudy night totally unable to see my hand an inch in front of my face because of the absence of light. Dark. Turn off the sun and that’s what we’d get.
Luckily, it’s the middle of the day, and Mr. Sun is doing his shining thing and there’s not a cloud in the sky, so your car is awash in photons.
But a photon isn’t anything until it hits something, like your car. Some get absorbed by the paint, their illumination energy gets morphed into heat energy, making the paint feel hot.
Other photons bounce off the paint as reflections.
The photon that bounces off the car’s red paint travels until it hits your eye. If it misses your eye, it will travel on forever. Forever.
This is all too trippy for me to deal with: the sun’s gravity pulls its hydrogen shell down and down toward its center. There the gravitational pressure is so fantastically huge that it squishes the hydrogen atoms into each other, creating helium. That squishing releases an epic amount of radiation, some of it escaping as photons.
But that photon is released at the center of the sun. It takes, sit down, now, it takes a million years for that photon to get from the center of the sun to the surface. A. Million. Years.
Finally, Joe Photon squirts away from the sun at literally the speed of light. Eight minutes later it hits your new car. In a billionth of a second it richochets off the paint and right into your eye. And it dies there, registering in your brain as red paint.
That red paint? What you’re seeing is wave after wave after wave of million-year-old photons. Photons that would continue traveling right through the universe forever, but for your eyeballs.
A single photon is far too small to register. No, you need a flock of photons hitting your car all at once for you to see it.
To light your car for ONE SECOND requires one octillion photons, which is 10 to the 27th power (ten times ten times ten twenty-seven times). That’s for one second.
This is how many photons it takes: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A second. OMG that’s so many photons!!!
Now, I’d continue to rave on about how crazy that number is when you consider how much daylight there is around you. That octillion number is just for your car… but the pirates have returned.
Pirates are attacking my WhistleBump websites at this very moment. Sites aimed at helping young adults learn life skills, they are (here we go): ScrumbleDoc, GrumblePark, TumbleBump, TangleWicket, and SkippityWhistles. Yes, that’s a shameless plug, if you’re counting.
I get easily a dozen emails a day at each site from genuine pirates – spammers. Most are Russian, I believe. Big, long treatises on something about which I don’t know because, duh, I don’t speak Russian.
Like scraping barnacles off the hull of a smooth-sailing ship, I daily have to go and knock these scabby little scraps of spam, lest I spread their foul message across the metaverse. Yo ho, yo ho, no pirate’s life for you, me bucko!
The good news is that you’re spared more factoid-style lectures from yours truly.
Perhaps you should thank the pirates after all…