My lover quickly jokes that I am nonresponsive at times by creating a noise echoing with his hands to his mouth...schhhhhhhh... it sounds exactly like the snow you hear on a television station that has no signal. Meaning I have no signal, no brain activity. I think it's hilarious when he does this so I have a rebuttal concerning my lack of brain activity when I apparently have no signal. Read the following chapter I found in a book called "The Everyday Science Of Everyday Life" by Jay Ingram. I will now tell him that I am listening to God as I believe God created the universe however I respect that scientests believe otherwise.
The Big Bang on Cable © Jay Ingram 1989
(Used with permission by Mr. Ingram personally)
The next time you find yourself in front ot the television set looking for entertainment, throw away the TV guide and find a channel where there’s absolutely nothing on (yes, yes I know that’s most of them), a channel where there’s nothing but snow. Or if you’re idly scanning through the stations on your car radio, turn to the high end of the FM dial, somewhere around 108 MHz, and listen for the hiss in the space between stations. Once you’ve found it, you can revel in the unbelievable fact that your radio or TV is giving you a glimpse of the beginnings of the universe.
The snow on your TV set is just electric noise, a disorganized collection of unrelated photons-particles of electromagnetic radiation-flooding the antenna itself. Three or four percent of those photons have been flying around outer space for fifteen billion years or so, having first appeared a mere three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the explosion that began our universe.
The idea of the Big Bang is not an easy one to come to grips with. You have to start with the idea that the entire universe that we can see from the earth today is expanding: all the galaxies, and indeed clusters of galaxies, the billions or even trillions of stars in each of them, and the gigantic swirling clouds of dust and gas are all rushing away from each other at fantastic speeds. And they’re not fleeing to empty corners of the universe-space itself is expanding. The analogy often given is that the galaxies are like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. They’re moving away from each other because the dough between them is expanding. Obviously, if when we look out into space today we see everything rushing away from everything else, it’s reasonable to suppose that a long time ago everything was closer together that it is now, and the further back in time, the closer together it was. Physics dictates the the smaller and denser the universe was billions of years ago, the hotter it was. So if you extrapolate back far enough in time, like reversing a film, you come up with the entire universe crammed into a tiny ball that’s so hot and dense that it defies modern physics. That ball, however it came into being, exploded outward. The explosion is now called the Big Bang, and we’re living in it’s aftermath, the expanding universe.
The universe having begun as an object that’s too hot and too dense for explanation, cooled and expanded rapidly enough that even within the first small fractions of a second, it had assumed a form that physicists can comprehend. Even so , for hundreds of thousands of years it was still too hot for atoms to form, Because the moment the parts of atoms, principally the protons and electrons, formed tentative bonds, they were torn apart-they couldn’t withstand the agitation caused by the heat.
As long as atoms couldn’t form, the particles of light, the photons,were trapped. They’d travel a tiny distance only to be deflected or absorbed by free-floating electrons. Light went nowhere at that time, even tough there was lots of it. Astronomers describe this as the era when the universe was "opaque": everywhere bright, but nothing to see.
The Big Bang on Cable © Jay Ingram 1989
(Used with permission by Mr. Ingram personally)
The next time you find yourself in front ot the television set looking for entertainment, throw away the TV guide and find a channel where there’s absolutely nothing on (yes, yes I know that’s most of them), a channel where there’s nothing but snow. Or if you’re idly scanning through the stations on your car radio, turn to the high end of the FM dial, somewhere around 108 MHz, and listen for the hiss in the space between stations. Once you’ve found it, you can revel in the unbelievable fact that your radio or TV is giving you a glimpse of the beginnings of the universe.
The snow on your TV set is just electric noise, a disorganized collection of unrelated photons-particles of electromagnetic radiation-flooding the antenna itself. Three or four percent of those photons have been flying around outer space for fifteen billion years or so, having first appeared a mere three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the explosion that began our universe.
The idea of the Big Bang is not an easy one to come to grips with. You have to start with the idea that the entire universe that we can see from the earth today is expanding: all the galaxies, and indeed clusters of galaxies, the billions or even trillions of stars in each of them, and the gigantic swirling clouds of dust and gas are all rushing away from each other at fantastic speeds. And they’re not fleeing to empty corners of the universe-space itself is expanding. The analogy often given is that the galaxies are like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. They’re moving away from each other because the dough between them is expanding. Obviously, if when we look out into space today we see everything rushing away from everything else, it’s reasonable to suppose that a long time ago everything was closer together that it is now, and the further back in time, the closer together it was. Physics dictates the the smaller and denser the universe was billions of years ago, the hotter it was. So if you extrapolate back far enough in time, like reversing a film, you come up with the entire universe crammed into a tiny ball that’s so hot and dense that it defies modern physics. That ball, however it came into being, exploded outward. The explosion is now called the Big Bang, and we’re living in it’s aftermath, the expanding universe.
The universe having begun as an object that’s too hot and too dense for explanation, cooled and expanded rapidly enough that even within the first small fractions of a second, it had assumed a form that physicists can comprehend. Even so , for hundreds of thousands of years it was still too hot for atoms to form, Because the moment the parts of atoms, principally the protons and electrons, formed tentative bonds, they were torn apart-they couldn’t withstand the agitation caused by the heat.
As long as atoms couldn’t form, the particles of light, the photons,were trapped. They’d travel a tiny distance only to be deflected or absorbed by free-floating electrons. Light went nowhere at that time, even tough there was lots of it. Astronomers describe this as the era when the universe was "opaque": everywhere bright, but nothing to see.
However, about 300 000 years after the Big Bang, there was a history-making event, the scientific equivalent of "Let There Be Light!" The temperature of the steadily cooling universe suddenly reached a point where protons, neutrons and electrons could stick together and form atoms. Once they did, the photons were suddenly free. There were no more loose electrons to intercept them, so light could travel in unimpeded straight lines, as it does today. That’s when your TV-set photons got their start.
The temperature of the entire universe at this point was about 3000 degrees Celsius, roughly the temperature of the filament in a light bulb, and the particles of light that were set free reflected that: they had the very short wavelengths typical of photons released from a hot object. (The most common example of this process in and element on an electric range. As it heats up, its colour changes because the radiation coming from it has shorter wavelengths. Even when it’s cold it’s radiating, but the waves are so long, you can’t see them.)
Since that time, fifteen billion years ago by current reckoning, a lot has changed. Because the universe has been expanding steadily, the waves of these light particles have been stretched out proportionally. Very short when the universe was relatively small, they’re now very long-wavelengths more typical of the radiation that would be produced by something very cold rather than something hot. That’s exactly what astronomers discovered in the mid-sixties: no matter where you look, the universe appears to be filled with the kind of radiation that would be produced by an object that’s only three degrees above the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero. That’s what’s happened to the photons released in that momentous event three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang: what was an explosion of light that filled the universe has become nothing more than a cold, faint, invisible glimmer.
But the photons continue to rain down on us. It’s estimated that there are five hundred thousand of them still left in every liter of the universe, and given that travel at the speed of light-they are a form of light, after all, several hundred trillion of these will pass through the palm of your extended hand every second! There’s no risk to you, of course- this radiation has an intensity of only one ten-millionth of a hundred-watt light bulb. But it is still enough to produce a few pops and crackles in our radios and television sets. However you pick up your television signal, whether by satellite, cable or just plain old aerial antenna, it has spent part of its time traveling through the air in the form of photons. When you tune in a channel, you are selecting photons that are traveling in concert in waves of a specific length. No matter what television station you are tuning in (and on some FM radio stations), some of the photons from the Big Bang have just the right wavelength that a few of them contribute to the radio hiss or the television snow. Right in your living room there is real evidence of the Big Bang.
While this cosmic background makes up only a tiny percentage of the snow or hiss. And while it is admittedly a pale shadow of its original awe-inspiring splendor, it is commercial-free and perfectly suitable for family viewing.
Jay Ingram is a science writer raised in Canada, he now resides in Toronto. He has taught at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute after earning a B.Sc. at the University of Alberta and a M.Sc. from the University of Toronto. His writing has earned him two ACTRA Awards as well as the Royal Canadian Institute’s Sanford Fleming Medal for popularizing science. Jay Ingram has also been the host of a popular radio show "Quirks and Quarks" he has published 8 books and is currently the host of the popular TV science series, Daily Planet which is seen on the Discovery Channel.
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