Serious Units Fables: Apollo invents the lyre

Part 10 — How Apollo Invented the Lyre

When the universe was new, the first god to visit was Apollo and he discovered that a turtle had already been there. He found the turtle's shell and strung strings on it. The first string to be attached was the string of speed and when the god had strung it on the shell he plucked it and it sang a riddle to the god:

My swiftness is the speed of light,
My energy: the square,
My force: the square of the square,
My voice is woven into width and height.

The second string which the god strung on the shell was the string of force: the main force of the world which is the most two things can attract before they merge. The square of the square of the world's top speed measures the tumult of the world, and that tumult is proportional to the force. The next string he strung on the shell was the string of power, the world's full power — that of main force pushing at top speed. The god plucked the strings of force and power, and they sang:

At cosmic speed the cosmic force
Drives cosmic power with its push.
The square root of that power's rush
Is heartbeat to the universe.

The next was the string of frequency — the core rhythm of the world. The universe's core frequency was ten-to-forty times that of the D string of the violin, which hadn't been invented yet. When the god plucked the strings of power and frequency, they sang:

Two rates are in the wavelets' stream:
the rates they vibrate and arrive.
To tell the power of the beam,
the two rates can be multiplied.

Thinking of light as a rush of quanta, the size of the rush depends on two frequencies: the rate of vibration of an average individual and the rate individuals arrive (how many swarm in through the window during a given time). If you multiply the arrival and vibration rates together, you get a square-frequency measure of the rush—and this square frequency is proportional to the light's power. All that is needed to find the power is to multiply the square frequency (showing how big the rush is) by Planck's constant.

Every power level has associated with it a square frequency showing how big a rush (arrival rate times vibration rate) is needed to deliver that much power. The square root of the rush associated with the universe's full power is equal to its core frequency.

The last string Apollo strung to the shell was the string of temperature: the world's primal temperature, which it had the moment it was born. This is the temperature with universal core frequency as the keynote of its color — the fundamental which describes its glow. When all the strings were strung, Apollo had made the Lyre. He strummed it to see that it was in tune, and as he strummed, he noticed that the sun and the stars had come into being.