In the Forbidden City there was a 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 thousand per minute, so the two vibrations in the sage's chant went through 50 and 200 thousand radians of phase per minute.
When Chuangtze sat and closed his eyes and meditated and chanted those two tones then the voltage difference between his two earlobes became similar to that of a rechargeable NiCad cell. In lands beyond the Wall the sage's voltage might be called "one-point-two 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 connect wires to them.
Laotzu, as you may remember, discovered that the frequencies of the three dervish colors of light were 140, 200, and 250 quadrillion per minute. 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 associated voltage, is proportional to the light's frequency.
The experiment was performed in the Forbidden City before the throne of the Son of Heaven and it was found that the voltage produced by dervish red was 1.4 times the standard earlobe voltage of the sage. The voltage produced by dervish green was 2, and that by deep dervish violet-blue was 2.5. Afterwards the Emperor declared that the Chuangtze earlobe standard was to be called the "tao" voltage because it was in harmony with nature.
The frequency associated with the Chuangtze earlobe standard itself is exactly 100 quadrillion per minute, which illustrates what the ancients called "linearity." Beyond the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom, the ratio relating the frequency of light to the photoelectric voltage it produces is described as "e over Planck's h-bar", or the reciprocal "photoelectric constant." This proportion is intrinsic in light throughout the universe.
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Copyright © 2002 Leonard Cottrell. All rights reserved.
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