I have a long history of chatting with storytellers and found myself talking with a group of four today. Someone asked me to describe what fills me with awe. Somany possibilities, but I went with the early evolution of the universe. There are rough spots, but quite a bit is known from the first hundred billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second from the beginning to the emergence of much of physics at around twenty picoseconds, elementary particles around a microsecond and then hydrogen and helium around two minutes. A very busy time, but the first bit that can be directly detected by us (so far) took place about 380,000 years after the beginning. In the trade it's called the surface of last scattering.
One stopped me - what a great title for a book or film! I gave a bit of an explanation, but it hit me there's something similar all of us have seen - it rises in the morning and sets at night. Nuclear fusion takes place in depths of the Sun. Energy is released in the from of photons which fly off to bump into other bits of plasma. They follow a complicated path pinball path. Energy in the form of light slowly makes progress towards the surface. Even though it's traveling at the speed of light, it takes roughly 10,000 years for energy from fusion at the Sun's core to reach the glowing "surface" we see. Once free from bouncing about it takes a bit more than eight minutes for light to travel the distance to Earth. This glowing region - the photosphere - is the last stop before light can leave the Sun. It's a surface of last scattering.
Many names in science aren't clever or poetic, but this one has a certain beauty. And in the early universe it marks the time where the glow from the hot plasma can be seen and measured by us.
Another feature of solar physics is fusion proceeds so slowly that the power per unit area (sometimes called the power density a bit confusingly) is roughly the same as the metabolism of a lizard or about a quarter of your metabolism. Of course there's a lot of Sun - a good thing as it's been able to last long enough for life to emerge on Earth and evolve to the point where you exist. Life as we know it is not based on run fast and break things stars.
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I'd venture a guess that many lines of work have bits and pieces of internal poetry that you tend not to think about. What's yours?
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