[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.”]
Up at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum, toward the higher energies, things are different again. Just above the energies of visible light is ultraviolet. If you’re little cube is outside there’s a lot of ultraviolet radiation pouring through from the sun. With its higher energy, ultraviolet radiation can affect physical changes on certain living cells. That’s what we call sunburn.
Up the energy spectrum beyond that come x-rays. And our cube of air should be pretty safe from those. There are some shooting through from high-energy events in deep space, but nothing to worry about.
Then come gamma rays and cosmic rays. High energy cosmic rays from deep in space pour through our little cube all the time. Mostly they just shoot straight through.
And there are gamma rays flying around too, mostly from the natural breakdown and decay of the nuclei of atoms all around us, and in us. That’s what we think of as nuclear radiation. We live in a sea of it. It’s called the natural background radiation.
Inside our own bodies, there are over one billion atomic nuclei that decay every second. When they do, they send out a shower of very high energy photons. And protons and neutrons. And a whole new menagerie of other particles we won’t even go into. Some of those are whizzing through our cube too.
And I think I should mention neutrinos now. Although I don’t want to send your brain into overload.
You see, neutrinos are particles with a little mass but with zero charge. They move very quickly, like photons, but they almost never interact with anything. To a neutrino, the Earth is completely and utterly transparent. They pass straight through all the time.
Now, take a moment to reconsider all the photon information we talked about that is passing through our cube at any given moment. The visible light, the radio energy, the heat energy, the higher energies. And then read the next sentence very carefully: There may be almost twice as many neutrinos in the universe as there are photons.
It’s okay. Take a breath. Read that sentence again. And take another breath.
Well, that’s out of the way.
The cube is getting crowded. Or is it? This is just a passing glimpse at what modern science sees in an “empty” cube of our mundane temporal reality. And you’re looking for bigger answers? We’d better learn to crawl before we walk.
You might want to review a few earlier chapters. Then let’s get crawling.
— continuied (Next: What’s holding it all down?)