Laotzu believed that the universe was created by Apollo, the god of music, but when it came to actually pouring the foundations he hired four giants to do the work. It should be obvious that the world was created by a god of music (look at all the proportions). But musicians are not always the handiest at carpentry so it was not altogether unexpected that the god would rely on contractors. Laotzu says that when they showed up for work on the first morning there was one very big giant, two medium-sized, and one not as big as the rest whose name was Extreme Density.
The biggest of the four giants was Allfire Brightness. He appeared before Apollo at the beginning of time as an incredibly bright illumination. The illumination around here would look like utter darkness beside him. Allfire was a glorious radiance hundrednineteen orders of magnitude greater than that most dazzling sunlight we could ever see. The progress of time is from bright to dark and he is the absolute brightness marking time's beginning.
According to Laotzu the two medium-sized giants were the twin sisters: Allmighty Pressure and Complete Concentration. Allmighty Pressure was the wife of Allfire Brightness and her pressure was the very pressure which light of Allfire's world-class brightness exerts. The force which any light exerts on an unreflective surface can easily be reckoned if one divides its power by the speed of light, and in this case dividing Allfire Brightness by the speed of light gives Allmighty Pressure. Her pressure was 10119 times greater than the pressure sunlight exerts on an unreflective surface at our distance from the sun. Number values for these four giants will be provided afterwards—for now just picture them as outrageously huge and totally off the charts. In Laotzu's view, Allmighty Pressure was the giant who caused this universe to bud from the untold. It was she who caused space to swell up and be.
Pressure and energy concentration are algebraically identical and measured on the same scale, which was why the two medium-sized giants were twin sisters. The unit of pressure has unit force in the numerator and unit area in the denominator, and if you simply insert an extra factor of the unit length in both the numerator and denominator, the unit force changes to unit energy and the unit area changes to unit volume. So without any essential change the unit of pressure becomes energy-per-volume: the unit of energy concentration. Accordingly, every pressure has its energy concentration twin, and Allmighty Pressure's twin was Complete Concentration. She was the intense concentration of energy that existed at the beginning of time and provided all the material for the stars.
In Laotzu's opinion, matter and light arise from each other. Matter turning into light and light into matter is especially likely to happen if the energy is as fiercely concentrated as it was in the beginning. In the beginning, Laotzu claimed, the world was a changeling soup. The light would not stay light but constantly changed itself into matter and the matter would not stay matter but constantly annihilated itself and became light. In those days it was too hot to have the stable distinctions we have now.
If it just happened that in some region all the energy turned into matter, then the matter would have a certain mass which you would find from the energy through dividing by the square of the speed of light. As a case in point, dividing the Complete energy concentration at the beginning of time by the square of the speed of light would give the mass density associated with it — indeed this was the fourth giant: the Extreme Density associated with the beginning of the universe. He was Complete Concentration's husband — rather more compact and quieter than the other three, even seeming a bit morose compared with the cheerful Allfire Brightness.
Now when Apollo was creating the world he didn't know what size to make alpha. Alpha is just a number but it is deeply embedded in nature, in every atom, and you have to get it right for things to work. But this was definitely not a practical god. He knew about pi and liked pi a lot but he had no idea what to do about alpha. He discussed this with the giants and even ventured to mention some ideas he had had about making alpha something like pi2/60, or maybe 1/8 pi. Or 1/pi4. Anyway something nice and elegant.
The giants were appalled. It scandalized them that a god could be so ignorant and cavallier about serious building things. At first they just stood there shaking their heads and glancing sideways at each other. They knew that alpha has to be very close to 1/137.036. You will TOTALLY SCREW UP the world you are making if you let it be even a couple of percent bigger or smaller than that. As they saw it, there wasn't any theoretical reason alpha HAD to be 1/137. It's just that things would be a mess if alpha was different. Builders get to know things like that. Maybe it's somewhere in the building code for worlds. The giants stood there not saying anything, each one wondering if they should just ask to be paid off and leave Apollo to screw up the world however he wanted.
Finally Extreme Density spoke up. "Matter will decay if you make it that." (He was talking about one of Apollo's ideas for alpha, I don't know which.) "The atoms won't work. Nothing but hydrogen would last and maybe not even hydrogen. It has to be 1/137."
The god of music was taken aback. He looked at the three larger giants but they just nodded agreement. He tried to find out why but the giants wouldn't explain. They just stubbornly repeated that it had to be 1/137 or it wouldn't work, and they also intimated that there was another number that they were thinking about making 13 quintillion. Apollo threw up his hands and told them to just go ahead and make the world as they pleased. Then he went off into the untold and let the giants proceed with their work.
In our mile-minute-talent system all the units are just combinations of the three basic ones. The energy unit is tal (mile/min)2 and comes out to be about 5 food Calories. In metric the energy unit is kilogram (meter/second)2 but they give it a special name *joule*. So what I'm doing is just the standard construction but just leaving off the last step where you give the combination of base-units a name. The power unit is tal mile2/min3 and comes out to be about half a horsepower. whereas in metric the power unit is kilogram meter2/second3 and they call it *watt*.
The biggest of the four giants was Allfire Brightness and he was the incredibly bright illumination of 10126 powerunits per square mile, or 10126 tal mile2/min3 per square mile. It just happens that at this distance from the sun the intensity of direct sunlight is 107 in the same units (to within two percent.) This is where we get the factor of 10119 comparison with sunlight brightness.
The speed of light in our units is 107 mile/min. We can find Allmighty Pressure just by dividing Allfire Brightness by that and the result is 10119 forceunits per square mile, or 10119 tal mile/min2 per square mile.
This doesn't change if we insert a factor of mile in both numerator and denominator and the result is 10119 tal mile2/min2 per cubic mile. This is an energy-per-volume quantity: Allmighty Pressure's twin, namely Complete Concentration.
In our units the square of the speed of light is 1014 mile2/min2 and we can divide any energy concentration by that to get a mass density. Dividing Complete Concentration by c2 gives the mass-per-volume 10105 talents per cubic mile, which is the value for the fourth giant, Extreme Density.
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Copyright © 2002 Leonard Cottrell. All rights reserved.
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