| A Walk Among the Atoms |
|
|
|
| Written by Roger Born | |
|
View orginal article at MyMac.com
Have you ever wondered what its like down there, among things as small as atoms? Come take a short stroll and see. Oh, don't worry, we'll use the regular cantations to get there and back, so come along and prepare to be amazed. I promised you a walk down there. Light, the electromagnetic spectrum, is essentially what makes up everything there is. When Light was formed into matter, both space and time were also locally created at the same time as a part of that process. The smallest part of this matter is called the Atom, named by the ancient Greeks. Funny, most people, thinking about the atom, think of something the about size and shape of a small green pea... (R.A.Heinlein) Actually, it is a bit more simple than that. Think of our bodies, made of trillions of specialized cells. Each of these complex living cells, with their barriers, their acids and proteins, is made of millions of molecules, each of which are made of hundreds or even thousands of atoms. What do they look like, these atoms? Lets take our walk now... When you get down to this size, which we have to measure in angstroms, nanometers which are very very small increments of a meter, you are struck with all the emptiness! No air down here! The air molecules are much too big to fit down here among the atoms of this matter! The atoms here are rather far apart from one another, and they are discrete entities. Their physical properties follow rules of physics that differ greatly from the physical laws up there in our world of Man. The rules down here are very different. We are actually going down at the level where solid matter no longer really exists. We said that atoms are made of energy, and they are. Tremendous energy, bound into solid and very stable quanta, or discrete components. When you look at atoms in a special microscope, what you really see is their electron shell, which looks like a bright fuzzy globe. This shell is almost impenetrable to us, because of the huge force required to pull it apart. We do pull these atoms apart in expensive colliders, which is about as useful for understanding the atom as studying intricate gyroscopes by busting them up with a hammer. To reach the place where we can see atoms, in our imaginary walk, we are going to have to shrink a bit. As we mentally downsize ourselves, we leave the realm of chaos and descend into the world of order! Our size diminishes greatly as we descend into the matter we are standing on, suddenly atoms are all around us now in equally and perfectly spaced rows, stretching infinitely in every direction as far as we can see. Everything around us is cloaked in sudden darkness, and the colors have become monochromatic. Why? It is because we have become smaller than the wavelengths of visible light! If we were really making this journey, we would suddenly find we were unable to breathe. Vacuum is all around us now, here in the great open spaces between the atoms. So lets just look at a single, simple hydrogen atom, if we can find one. It will be one with a single proton, or nucleus, and a single electron, or outer shell. That one over there! Lets go see! It looks opaque, and it is, because of the single electron speeding in orbit around it. Its precession makes it a completely impervious globe to our eyes, but hey, we are not using real eyes here, nor are we using visible light, since the visible wavelengths are now much longer than this atom we are studying. Lets pretend that this atom is 1000 feet in diameter, that is, its electron shell. It looks that way to us because we have shrunk quite a bit to get here! All the next closest atoms are about a mile away from this one in every direction. Lots of empty space down here! Most all matter everywhere in the universe is like this, you know... The reason we cannot see past the shell of this hydrogen atom is because the electron is in orbit around the proton, and it is orbiting at close to the speed of light (What Einstein called the speed of C). What great thing holds that electron in orbit 500 feet away from its center? The Proton! Would you believe that Proton is about the size of a BB at this scale we are at right now! So, how can we look beyond the electron sphere? To get inside this atom, we will have to slow time down a bit. So, we will use an incantation, an old one: "A day is like a thousand years!" Great! Now everything is many thousand times slower! (Don't worry, we can use the reverse incantation to get back again.) As we look at the electron sphere, we see individual trails of the electron. It sort of looks like a loosely wound ball of yarn around a balloon. If we are careful, we can just squeeze between these traces into the inner part of the atom! There we go! Now we have truly gone where no one has gone before! Off over in the center is the nucleus, that Proton! No one has ever seen one of these before! Lets stroll over to take a look! Good thing this is only a head trip, the vacuum here is avsolutely perfect. So is the temperature. It doesn't exist. The vacuum outside the electron shell is also pretty rare, but there is a force field out there. Yet, compared to the one in here, the field out there is very weak. Lets look closely at the Proton now. What a remarkable engine is the Proton! (There are several theoretical models, but really, no one knows yet how it looks.) We know it is made of the same Light energy that everything else is made of, but how is it bent into an engine that can hold the electron in place? Remember it also firmly holds the other atoms, about a mile apart at this scale, in their places as well. Interesting! That electromotive force that holds all these atoms tightly together also holds them at a perfect distance from each other. It is kind of like they are immersed in a force field which is powered by all the local individual atoms themselves. To understand what you are seeing now when you look at the Proton, you will have to accept that there are some dramatic changes in time and space. Like we said, essentially the Proton in all of its elements is electromagnetic energy, and each of these are always moving at the speed of C. But remember, the physics down here are different. So, just what is electromagnetic energy, or Light? It is a single dimensional point, or a particle, if you will, moving at the speed of C. It has no mass, but by its speed, it produces gravity waves, strong ones if it travels in the close and particular formations that create matter. A single light point, not going anywhere, but just *spinning* at C would have powerful gravametric force. Thousands and millions of them, closely bound together, would have enough attractive force to forever hold an electron in its orbit. But what holds all these individual points of light together in the Proton? Of course I am throwing around these words, gravametric, electromotive, electromagnetic, ... each are poor attempts by us to describe the amazing effect that these Protons have on everything around them, at sometimes faster speeds than even light! Look closely now at the Proton. Beautiful isn't it? It is a silvery, glowing engine of light! At this time velocity, it is moving at an almost viewable speed. I can count 66 discrete components, each one of which is perhaps made of billions of light points. Look with me at it. We are walking up to it, and from a short distance, it looks sort of ghostly, or nebulous. If we had seen it earlier when time was normal, it would have looked like a bright, buzzing, fuzzy globe of light, aglow with great flashes and wild pulsings. But now we can see it greatly slowed down... Lets shrink ourselves a bit more here... Over the whole fantastic engine of the Proton, now about a yard across at our scale, is an almost transparent force field. It looks a little like a soap bubble, doesn't it? If you touch it, you will find it to be harder than any metal. Everything inside is impervious to our touch because of this strongest of all barrier forces that exist in nature. But look inside this bright outer force bubble! Down deep inside are 24 glowing, silvery spheres, each about 8 or 9 inches in diameter. No metal parts in this thing! It is all light and forces. The spheres are perfectly shaped and are running in perfect paths. In fact they are all orbiting around each other in three interconnected rings, with eight spheres in each ring. As the rings cross each other, the spheres are perfectly aligned to allow the others to travel between without collision. This is far more intricate than any geared watchworks, because it is in three dimensions! Although they are moving sort of fast, we can see each of the separate components and discern their movements, with a little patient observation... Watching them, you and I are struck with the force of the concept behind the Proton... This is a like a manufactured device! No Manmade engine could ever work so smoothly, or be manufactured with such precision as these spheres inside the Proton, but they are made by somebody, after all! Look at them rotating and spinning in perfect precision! Nothing like this exists anywhere else in the universe! Amazing! How are they made? It obviously took a tremendous force to mold these quanta of light particles into these individual components, but here they are, staring us in the face... Although the movement of those spheres is very captivating, soon you and I notice that there are other components surrounding these 24. Inside their ever tumbling raceways, there is nothing in the center, but in clusters around these 24, are groups of other spheres, and half-spheres, (!!!) each transparent and brightly lit with their turning and rotating thousands and millions of light points! It is these half-spheres that intrigue us. The missing half of their spheres all intersect those three rotating rings of spinning spheres! How is this possible? We see inside these half-spheres an apparent complete rotation of their elements, but what particles of light disappears down one side, instantly appears on the other side. Fascinating! Each of these outer spheres and half-spheres has its own rotation, or direction, relative to the others. Some are left handed, or clockwise rotators, others are right handed or counter-clockwise rotators. Still others rotate up or down relative to the rest. Some seem to rotate only half or quarter turns! Where is the rest of their rotation? (It is these components that the physicists have called Up, Down, Strange, Charm, etc.) It so happens that these half-spheres are doing one of two things: One is that they are partially submerged in one of six extra dimensions, which we cannot see. And some of them are turning backwards in time. That is, in relationship to all the other spheres which are generally following time's arrow! How are some of these attached to other dimensions? I thought those extra dimensions were very, very small, and not noticeable in the real world? They are very small, but at this scale a component or element of the proton can fit into them rather nicely, don't you think? What is the purpose for these half-spheres being imbedded in another dimension, (or "Quantum Foam," as Del Miller calls it)? And are parts of them really rotating backwards in time? I presume to answer that this is part of the design which holds the whole engine tightly together, so that it doesn't fly apart. Face it, if this design relied on simple positive and negative charges to hold it together, it would have blown apart eons ago! No, what is required are half and quarter charges, and other strange things, such as reverse time precession, for all of this to work at all! And Protons work, effortlessly, always at the speed of C, practically forever! What a marvelous and mysterious design! These backward-in-time spinning particles, what is their charge? One-half? One-third? None? Oh well, we will leave it to the physicists to explain all that. And they are, slowly, with their ever developing Standard Model... Rather, just lets you and me be comforted to know that the force that holds this little engine together is the most powerful force in the universe! Wait! There is more! I took a quick look down below this Proton. Shocking! See? It is like this surrounding field is not symetrical. Looking at the whole Proton, as your eyes follow the curve down the side, the whole thing disappears! Looking up from the bottom of the Proton, you see a sort of static halo surrounding where it is, but there is nothing there! Where is the bottom? Looking into the top again, you see everything, but you also notice that the Proton's interior is much deeper than you first noticed. It is quite deep, isn't it? What gives here? I think we are seeing part of the Proton slipping in and out of another dimension or media. This obviously doesn't change its physical character or its impact on the electron shell, or other atoms, but nonetheless it is intriguing. There was once a place referred to somewhere as "The Abode of Light." Perhaps this Proton is somehow connected to that place, and this is how it gets its power... There are some who even today maintain that the whole proton is half embedded in the ETHER and only half of it appears in our reality. Ether? Yeah, I know. It supplies some answers to the thorny paradoxes of the Proton, but the whole idea of there being an Ether brings a lot more problems to the table, huh? As a concept this just never goes away.... Time will tell if this is true or not. I love watching this Proton! See it vibrate just now? We are not affecting it, since we are not really here, but up above, in the real world, someone is walking across the floor, or talking, or music is playing... Those vibrations find their way down here into the smallest realm of reality, touching even this secretly enclosed and nearly invisible Proton in its impervious electon shell! Amazing! Such an intricate and beautiful little silvery engine created with such perfect precision! Such wondrous and perfect design! So brightly animated and silky silent in its operation! Looking at it, you think it could run forever, since it is so well constructed. It even seems to be self-powered somehow! Upon this, the Hydrogen Proton, is everything built! Everything that exists as matter has this same basic component at its core... Think of it! All these stable little atoms! You can shake them and bake them, you can stir them and fry them, nothing fazes the atom! They just keep on ticking, regardless of the licking you give them. Yeah, the atoms individually absorb energy, as much as you can give them. Adding energy to them only raises their energy state to the next quanta, because they are very descrete, and they follow precise rules... They can be vibrated most vigorously, yet they are still very stable. Each with this marvelous and eternal little Proton at their center! The Proton can lose its electron though, sometimes through chemical action, sometimes through sound at a certain frequency, and sometimes through collision with other electrons in a radioactive environment. Proton is not happy without its electron, so it quickly gets another one as soon as it can. Electricity as we know it, depends on this function, you know... Now we can talk about their sex life! Protons, like we said are very discrete you know... But given enough extra energy they can combine in what we call Transumations. A simple proton and electron is the hydrogen atom. Add some more electrons here, some more protons or neutrons there, and soon you have the beginning of an atomic number table of the elements! Most every one of these other, bigger and more intricate atoms are also very stable, but they are oh, so big! Hundreds of Protons and Neutrons at their core, with thousands of electrons in orbit around them! I could not begin to describe to you how their protons are configured. (This simplest one is hard enough!) Now we need to go back to our regular size, and our regular time reference... Up we go! ...oh yeah, that incantation: "A thousand years is like a day!" Now we are back to normal size and time! Hard to believe that down among the atoms there is 99.9999 percent emptiness, isn't it? Also hard to believe that super solid atoms are nothing but bound energy, after all! Look around us now, since it is all back to 'normal,' if you told your friends about this matter, they wouldn't believe you, would they? Knock on wood... See! It is solid matter! What do you mean, it is all empty spaces and Light? But you and I have been down there. We know how things really are, don't we? So why is this important? Does our little walk change our reality? Not really. Everything is as it should be... However, we better understand our reality now. It is all photonic - everything that exists is a holodeck reality, which might disappear someday, when the power plug is pulled.... Knowing that some Engineer is powerful enough to bend these sublime forces into matter, even if it is just for a few thousand years or so, is sobering to think about. Who is this creator, or what is the power of his creative force? (Does he care about us?) If this reality is all just temporarily bound energy, where is the real world, the real universe, where matter is real and permanent, and not photonic? How solid and permanent, and beautiful will it be, once we see it for ourselves? ( I think C.S. Lewis wrote about this idea a lot...) "And God said, 'Let there be Light...' " Humm! That was the beginning alright! Wow! Who would have thought? "What is Man, that you are mindful of him, O Lord? Or the Son of man, that you care for him?" Who ever created all this had us in mind, didn't he? What do you think? "He continually upholds all things by the power of his word..." A comforting thought, with implications for life to continue as long as there is that Engineer around. Having seen how things are made, and how they exist brings up so many questions and proposes to us so many implications for every part of our existence. We need to think about these things some more. Obviously, the implications of what we have seen in the atom are more profound than we first imagined! I will leave you with that, my friend. Thanks for walking with me again! Roger Born |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|