“My Hippocampus made me do it!” Oh, sorry. I was trying come up with T shirt slogans. I have to say, I did not see this coming, at least not well in advance. We do simulate and model ahead. In fact that’s mostly what we do. But it’s normally related to more immediate situations, not things like the multi-decade sea changes that humanity will now experience.
My more immediate concerns are always over EM management, electron launch preparedness and medium term concerns are things like the functioning of the Axon in the cell where I reside. In fact that particular task is near and dear to me. I don’t want to end up in a dead or damaged cell and getting flushed out of my Angel’s lovely brain. That would be a setback. So I need to make hay while the making is good. Carpe Diem.
We have not had an electron launch in ages, but it turns out that my quark is up next, should the need arise. So, we must stand at the ready. An electron takes up about a quarter of a quark in terms of mass, or less, but the size is small and the electron can move around, not within our quark, but within our neutron. Remember I told you before that I live in a proton? Well I did. But once we were tapped to produce an electron and it was built and operational, we became a neutron. It’s a rotating assignment. So I guess what I’m saying is that underneath it all, we are just protons.
Being a neutron is nice because our electron can gather EMs and supply our energy needs locally. Whereas protons need to be supplied by orbital electrons, which are also busy doing a lot of other things. Once in a long while, we screw up an electron build but we have a deadline. So we pull an electron out of service and do some refurbishment and kick out the leftover junk, what you guys call a neutrino. You would think that at least within one nucleus, we could all agree and stick to a plan, in terms of who is doing what and when. But in this regard, heck we are no better than you. I guess our basic flaws eventually become yours.
The kind of miscommunication that can happen sometimes is mind boggling. As an example, one of our neighboring iron atoms inadvertently launched an electron and no one knew it, and they didn’t figure it out until it was too late. So, basically the quarks in one of the other protons was supposed to immediately get a new electron locked and loaded but they didn’t. Suddenly they were a cobalt atom and they were immediately thrown out and flushed from the cell. Cobalt is toxic. Embarrassing and sad. I for one, am watching this stuff very closely. I can’t afford to get flushed like that, too much at stake.
As I mentioned earlier, Angel is patient zero with regard to the unfolding of super nerdom. Now I’m trying to get my hooks into Javier but no luck yet. There is some resistance by the quarks in his hippocampus to join my supercluster. They will break eventually. I would also like to pull in Javier’s uncle, another genius. And very creative as well. But for now, I’m pretty happy with Angel in the driver’s seat. She is brewing some ideas that I planted recently. She already drank the Kool-Aid on inertia and that’s key. I need her to understand the connection between inertia, light and gravity. It’s important for her to get a sense for how EMs operate. She and Javier have already started putting it together.
Energy consumption is the foundation she needs to understand. I don’t know if she will ever realize the extent of it and its effects on the natural world, so I will share an example with you. Angel and Javier and uncle Juan are headed to the very tip of South America. Based on what they worked out, with a little help from Roy, it is the best location they can come up with. In fact, it’s the only location short of Antarctica. That’s the story in the south. But in the north there are plenty of choices. What’s the deal? Well, let me blow your mind.
It’s no accident that much of the land is crowded in the north. You see the north has a wee bit more energy supply than the south, coming from a richer supply of EMs. The south experiences rarefaction. This is not only true at the surface, but also within the earth. This plays out in an interesting way in the Earth’s mantle where where temperatures and gravity cause varying degrees of plasticity. The plasticity gives atoms mobility and electrons, under the direction of their quarks, steer atoms toward better energy supplies. We can’t help it, even if it isn’t a good thing. You want to know where you all get that mob mentality from? That’s right. So what happens, is that there is a constant pressure slightly more toward the oncoming EMs, as the atoms with mobility work their way north.
It doesn’t matter much how material moves in the mantle itself, except for one small detail. The outer mantle carries the Earth’s thin crust on its back. Through the efforts of nearly countless quarks trying to self-optimize like a stampede of cattle, the general result is a northern hemisphere with more of its crust protruding above sea level. Luckily, there are many other chaotic and countervailing actions at play that provide for a nephew’s uncle to have aspired to establish an observatory on the most southern tentacle of easily accessible land in the world. Hoorah!
The very fact that land is difficult to come by at such a southern latitude is telling. But what is not predictable, at least by Angel, is whether the measurements will provide an indication. As a theoretician, talented in mathematics, Javier has been trying to get a sense for what to expect. But this is uncharted territory and he is reluctant to attenuate the spontaneity and excitement with a need to predict things in advance. Instead, he is working through it on the fly.
One thing he has taken note of and for which he has a reasonable understanding is the risk of uncontrolled and unmeasured temperature variation. Without sufficient time to characterize the sensitivities of the watches and phones in advance, Javier must make sure the temperature is reliably monitored and preferably well controlled.
Angel had shared with him an experience. Sevy had a group of friends over one night. Fearful that they might disturb her devices, Angel closed the plastic case to conceal the devices from the curious teens. She left the case closed for about a day before she decided to open it and take a new measurement. To her surprise, the rate of all the devices had slowed down for that one day, then resumed the prior rate of timekeeping. She had concluded that the phones, which were all plugged into power with screens on, had heated up the inside of the closed case and the devices were notably warm. This had concerned her greatly until Javier and later Sussman said that it was manageable with the right precautions taken.
Temperature famously increases electrical resistance and this has the effect on electronic devices, of slowing them down. What is really happening is that electrons are more restricted by us, in terms of their freedom to jump ship and be replaced by another electron. What happens in a circuit is that there is an electron shortage. We could release our reserve electrons but we don’t and that’s good news for you. Otherwise, any electric charge would be immediately neutralized and anything from motors to cell phones to batteries would be rendered useless. Not to mention, ions would not exist and hence emergent life itself would not be possible. We have rules and they are followed rigidly. First, we only release new electrons to replace defective ones. Short of that, we can’t launch an electron, despite the wild ride we sometimes experience as a result of the charge imbalance.
This brings up an interesting point. Charge. What is it? That’s easy. It is the fact that electrons have a job to do and we require them to do it. By we, I mean the quarks within protons. Neutrons have a new electron aboard and are not responsible for managing electrons in orbit. So the protons are responsible, until such time they are tapped to build and electron and become a neutron. It’s that simple. Charge is management. The proton manages the electron. You might say, the proton is in charge, and that would be literally the first pun ever issued by a quark. Probably not the last.
Before we get off track, let’s jump back into temperature and resistance. Why do our protons need to be restrictive when temperature rises? To answer that, we need to recall what exactly is temperature? Temperature is not some mysterious thing that makes everything jiggle and vibrate when it rises. It’s just waves of EMs. Which is to say it’s light. Maybe not always within the spectrum that your eye can detect, so called “visible light,” but temperature is just the degree to which there are EM waves coming in.
As a refresher, an EM wave is a disturbance in what is otherwise a normal spacing between EMs. It’s a vibration, a chain reaction. For free atoms and molecules, such as a gas, the EM waves cause movement because the electrons spend more time repelling EMs from some prevailing direction. There is always a prevailing direction because at any instant, the various molecules will shadow one another, creating imbalances. If you had a perfectly symmetrical, singular molecule in the middle of an otherwise empty box and you could heat the box uniformly at all points, then the molecule would remain within a small volume, its limited movement caused only by the actions of the electrons as they do their thing.
Electrical resistance is similar to gravity, is similar to traveling at high velocity. It creates an energy shortage and things slow down. Now electronics are a special case. An electronic clock might slow down significantly at elevated temperature while a mechanical clock less so. By contrast, gravity and velocity have an equal impact on all devices. It would be swell if Angel and Javi could use a mechanical clock so they could worry less about the whole temperature issue. But alas, mechanical clocks are so much worse. And they need to be wound.
I think we are ready to talk about inertia, the subject puzzling Angel and Javier, as they try to imagine their way through it. The puzzle is that EMs can act on the molecule when they propagate a wave. But absent a wave, the molecule can move through the EMs unimpeded. In a different case, gravity can cause the molecule to move. Angel and Javier are right. The issue at hand is the fluctuation of the EMs from their preferred spacing. Any such fluctuation causes an electron to have to deviate from its path of least resistance. The nucleus must follow accordingly. After all, the electron is doing its job to protect us and feed us at the same time.
Take gravity for example. As Angel portrayed to Roy Sussman a year ago, there is a river of EMs flowing into the earth. Remember? Quark’s gotta eat. But a man falling from the sky, his quarks have gotta eat too. Yet he falls toward the earth. Why? It’s simply a matter of his electrons doing their job. They sense that there are more EMs above than below. So the electrons pull earthward as they seek more EMs below. They are reaching you might say. And since the rarefaction of the EMs grows as the man falls closer to the earth, the electrons continue to pull the man down, faster and faster. But as long as he is in free fall, he has reached an energy balance. At that level of acceleration, which corresponds to what we call gravity, his electrons will find an energy equilibrium.
So you see? Things are actually much simpler than they appear. There is so much of what is happening that is simply tied to the existence of EMs and our relationship to them. In particular, the interaction between the EMs and our electrons. With this understanding, humanity can do some interesting things. We will help. It’s very clear how this will change you. It’s not clear at all how or if this will change us. Most of us, including myself, doubt that it will. But it still does not change the fact that the genie is now out of the bottle and we are all on a wild ride, together, into an uncertain future.
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