New Metric Fables: voltage

The Voltages of Dervish Colors

There was in the Forbidden City was another Taoist sage by the name of Chuangtze. Through meditation he could control his body temperature and create a voltage difference between his two earlobes, to use for reference.

Chuangtze had perfect pitch. When he meditated he chanted two tones in the same breath: a low tone one octave below middle D and a high tone one octave above middle D. The frequency of middle D is 100 per trice, so the two vibrations in the sage's chant went through 50 and 200 radians of phase per trice.

When Chuangtze sat and closed his eyes and meditated and chanted those two tones then the voltage difference between his two earlobes became slightly more than that of the battery in your car. In lands beyond the Wall the sage's voltage might be called "twelve-some volts," but people of the Middle Kingdom do not describe it thus. As a courtesy to the Emperor, Chuangtze wore small golden earrings so that the Emperor, whenever he needed a reference voltage, could attach lead-wires to them.

Laotzu, as you may remember, discovered that the frequencies of the three dervish colors of light were 1/7, 1/5, and 1/4 quadrillion per trice. Afterwards, he and the Emperor decided to see what voltages light of these three colors would produce in a photoelectric tube. Such tubes measure the energies of individual quanta of light. The energy of quanta of a particular color light is revealed by the tube voltage. This energy, and therefore the voltage indicator of it, is proportional to the light's frequency

The experiment was done in the Forbidden City before the throne of the Son of Heaven and it was found that the voltage produced by red light was 1/7 of the standard earlobe voltage of the sage. The voltage produced by green light was 1/5, and that by deep violet-blue light was 1/4. Afterwards the Emperor declared that the Chuangtze earlobe standard differential was to be called the "tao" voltage because it was in harmony with nature.

Beyond the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom, the ratio relating the voltage produced by a color of light to the frequency of that light is described as "Planck's h-bar over e", or as "the photoelectric constant." This proportion, which is intrinsic in light throughout the universe, has the value of one quadrillionth when expressed in the units of the Forbidden City.