Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Nov. 29, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

05:17

A Photon Travels Through the Universe

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	It's a little chink in the Venetian blind.
	It's a little chink on the Venetian blinds.
	And then the sun moves a little, it hits your eyes, wakes you up in that orange warmth of returning to consciousness through the warm pressure of sunlight, like the gentlest mother hand in the universe.
	You wake up, you open your eyes, and you see the sunlight peeking through that blind.
	I want you to think of that.
	Think of that backtrack.
	It's really wild.
	There's a photon that is generated from the ongoing 10 billion year nuclear bomb called the Sun, should be called a space heater, and that photon goes cast off into space, rocketing off into space, and it goes the eight light minutes from the Sun to the Earth.
	Now, what happens to most of those photons?
	Well, we know, because we can look up at the night sky, we can look up at the stars, and those photons from distant suns have traveled dozens or hundreds of light years, or 4.7 light years for Alpha Centauri, the closest one I think, and it lands on us.
	That's where the photon comes, the flickering, right?
	I remember when I was a kid, not knowing about atmospheric ripples, I would look at the stars, see them flickering, and saying, well, they can't be getting five times their size and back small again.
	Why are they flickering?
	Like insane pufferfish holding in a sneeze forever.
	That photon leaps, blows off.
	The surface of the sun goes coruscating in to space.
	On a dead journey to infinity and nothingness.
	But no, it doesn't go off into the void to be seen by no eyes.
	Because I like to think that the photons only come alive when they're seen, because otherwise they're just dead energy in space.
	A wave or a particle, a wave or a particle, well, a wave of the particle, partially.
	And so, imagine how much that photon wins the lottery, right?
	Rockets into space, like a coked-up Superman, expecting to go into the void.
	No, it's like, holy shit, what's coming?
	Is that, is that a, what's that little blue, that little blue dial, blue and white?
	That's a planet, holy shit!
	Out of all the places I could go, the 360, 360, 360 infinity of the sphere around the sun, Jesus, I'm going to hit a planet.
	That's really wild.
	Oh, I'm going to hit a landmass.
	It's not a planet, it's a landmass.
	Oh, my God, that's really cool.
	I'm going to see a landmass.
	Oh, my God, I'm going to hit a city.
	Oh, God, I'm going to hit a building.
	Oh, my God.
	I think I can make it through the crack in that Phoenician blind.
	What are the odds?
	And then, I'm going to hit a sleeping guy.
	And then, the eye opens.
	I know we have to disregard the 186,000 miles an hour of the speed of light.
	Just go with me on this journey.
	And your eye opens, and that lonely photon, designed to be spiraled off into space to nothing.
	That photon goes into your mind like the most random sperm into the egg of consciousness.
	We are infinitely more lucky than that photon to land in a human mind.
	I'll go you one further.
	Think of Beetlejuice.
	No, not the stupid movie.
	That was really retarded, by the way.
	I think, what is it, 300 light-years away?
	Red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion.
	Oh, belt up.
	It's a supergiant star, distinctly reddish.
	Its radius is 640, between 640 and 764 times that of the Sun.
	Yeah, how about saying how far it is away?
	It's the brightest star in the night sky at near-infrared wavelengths.
	If Betelgeuse was at the center of our solar system, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
	Calculations of Betelgeuse's mass range from slightly under 10 to a little over 20 times that of the Sun.
	Its distance is difficult to measure, 400 to 600 light years from the Sun.
	It's less than 10 million years old, so it's a flash in the pan relative to our stable Betelgeuse has evolved rapidly because of its large mass.
	It's expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years.
	When Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-moon for more than three months.
	But life on Earth will be unharmed.
	Starting in October 2019, Betelgeuse has begun to dim noticeably from magnitude 0.5 to 1.7 by mid-February 2020.
	Suggesting so, infrared observations found no significant change in luminosity over the suggesting that the dimming was due to a change in extinction around the star rather than a more fundamental change.

▲