Aurora - Part 3

Overhead, it begins.

A slowly spreading green glow.

Driving onward through the night, I begin to watch the sky, the stars pinned in the darkness above, splitting my concentration between heaven and earth. It may come to nothing, a few sparks, a glimmer which quickly fades. No matter, I pay attention, for Aurora may chant the spell tonight and make -

Magic

In the illusory emptiness which is spacetime the great cloud, swirling and surging, envelops the earth in a fiercely erotic lovers embrace. Countless charged particles, gliding up and over, sliding down and under, drawn ever deeper on paths they feel, but cannot see. Called by a voice that they cannot resist, they seek union with the heart of that which has captured them, (Is that not love?)

and kindle green fire in the sky.

Spreading swiftly throughout the heavens I see,

shifting forms and moving shapes,

curtains made of green star fire,

billowing sheets of dancing light,

flowing green and winding rivers,

some gauze filmy and translucent,

others opaque and dancing velvet,

now compass the four horizons.

Unable to concentrate on driving any longer, I pull over on the shoulder and stop.

Kill the headlights,

leave the running lights on.

Aurora is singing the sky

with Green Fire.

I am drawn by her energy from my car,

to stand and gaze in awe at heaven.

Green shimmering,

the light curtains play games with perspective,

create a feeling of movement,

of falling upward,

outward,

into space.

I have never before seen a display of power like this.

Nor have I seen one since.

Uncountable charges, captured tightly, circling lines of flux spiral, bouncing back and forth like beads on a slinky, accelerate along the invisible path, closer, closer, closer…

Ever closer to that they so greatly desire.

To that which will remain,

forever,

out of reach.

I breath in nitrogen, oxygen.

The breath is the life.

I breath out nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide.

Three hundred miles above the world,

the seekers spiraling down

secret paths,

begin to collide

with molecules and atoms,

the guardian tenuous outliers of

the atmosphere.

A clapper strikes a bell.

That bell will dissipate that energy

as sounds.

A particle strikes an atom?

The atom dissipates that energy as heat,

or light.

(phonons or photons)

Bells of different size,

sing different notes.

Atoms of different size,

sing different colors.

Oxygen, green and red.

Nitrogen blue, ultraviolet.

The sky is become a great bell tower,

ringing changes.

A visible music.

I listen with my eyes,

hear waterfalling energy

singing curtains and walls,

singing sky filling arcs of green dancing fire,

two hundred miles tall.

The geomagnetic storm is inducing current in the car, in my body, in the Earth below my feet. Electrons begin a new dance in the power lines between Fairbanks and Healy, Beluga and Anchorage, the Eklutna lines, every power line in the north. The grounding connections for all things electric become highways for electrons to flow in rather than out. In the generator control rooms, utility workers watch their meters jump and bounce, hoping the storm won’t overload the system, explode the transformers, fry the generators, and plunge the railbelt cities and towns into darkness. Phone lines become noisy, satellite transmissions degrade, interrupt, television reception comes and...

Time passes -

how much?

I cannot tell.

I stand alone by the road this warm winter night and see the sky transfigured.

A southbound car passes,

breaking my trance.

I watch it slow,

pull over,

stop.

Then another, and another.

Tail lights multiply, pair by pair down the road,

up the road behind.

Running lights and flashers now firefly the road as far as I - as we? - can see.

But no two cars stop close to each other,

all leave some distance in,

between.

Respecting some unspoken need.

And so we join together,

over many miles tonight.

To watch alone, yet together.

To witness the invisible made visible.

To believe for a moment in things seen,

and unseen.

A great wind blows fiery clouds from a sun,

great waves roll through an endless black ocean,

and roar ashore,

in green spume and thunder.

All things have their moment,

beat,

and time.

Movement -

Rest.

So we stand by our cars on the night black asphalt,

A dark thread winding

Through a dark and silent land.

We stand alone together,

beneath this blazing sky,

And know we are part of something greater.

We stand beside our beasts of burden,

forged of the ancient iron,

forged by the violent deaths

of the first stars.

Iron they scattered through the universe like seed.

A gift - freely given.

Born of violent death.

Iron we tear from the earth,

heat and hammer into new shapes.

We stand beside our beasts of burden,

with our hands we make them,

feed them on hydrogen and carbon locked together by sunlight,

fossilized fusion,

ages buried.

It is the souls of stars,

living and dead,

That make us who we are,

and move us through our lives.

We are one short line,

in one brief chapter,

of the One Story.

Which began before time.

The end of which we will never know.

Though all of us, in a different form, will be there.

We stand alone together,

on this warm winter night,

weaving in subtle,

chemical patterns,

new memories.

We stand alone together,

our lives now strangely entangled,

Though many years,

and miles,

will soon separate us.

We stand alone together,

on this winter dark road.

We,

Children of stardust.

Breath of lost stars.

Bright sparks of thought.

Too brief embers of life.

We stand alone together,

and remember this moment,

Our part in the song.

For there above us -

God Dances

Aurora - Part 2

A Late Winter Night, Broad Pass, Alaska, Nineteen Eighty Something.

Parks Highway, Alaska Route 3, Southbound from Fairbanks,

on the heading for Anchorage.

Three hours out.

Four hours to go.

Very warm.

In the high thirties, maybe the low forties.

Dark. Six or seven p.m.

Perhaps eight.

Clear. No moon.

The stars are precise points in a satin black sky.

I am cruising down the Parks Highway, homeward bound to Anchorage. Headlights running ahead so fast I can never catch them up. I’m two hours deep into the radio gap between Nenana and Willow, with no broadcast stations within one hundred miles. When I turn on the radio all I hear is the electromagnetic radiation from the fuel injection and ignition systems, which varies in pitch with the engine rpm. Fainter is the radio noise from the solar system, galaxy, local cluster. And fainter still, I hear the sibilant white noise ssssss, that is the cold and slowly fading echo, the still small voice of the big bang.

There is no iPod. Nor CD. Not yet.

Nor for years still to come.

I have no cassettes or eight tracks, (ask your grandparents), no nothing. Even today the radio gap exists, most satellite radio is below our horizon.

It’s just me and the car and the dark and my thoughts, keeping company tonight, on this journey within the journey.

A magnetic storm rages in the face of our sun, (I do not presume we are alone in the universe). Above the storm, a Fire Serpent dances, trapped by tightly coiling fields in lines of flux and screaming current, free electrons and ionized gas. Writhes and howls, trapped between heaven and hell. Until the arcing Serpent bites its tail, short circuits the field, and sets itself free.

Perhaps hours ago, perhaps days, the sun burped, belched, farted, (take your pick).

A Coronal Mass Ejection

(no, it’s not obscene, get your mind out of the gutter),

coasts down the solar wind at three hundred miles per second.

Three hundred miles per second.

Could I do that, I’d have been home two hours fifty nine minutes and fifty nine seconds ago.

The Fire Serpent, now free,

is become an expanding cloud of particles and charge,

sailing the wine dark sea.

Larger than the planet which lies in its path,

the turbulent nimbus rolls and roils,

journeying toward a bright sapphire sphere, the Earth, our home….

Clear sky. No moon. Bright stars.

The snow berms flicker by, white, brown, gray. Not much to see except the headlights of the occasional car heading north. We salute each other with dipped low-beams as we approach, pass. I drive on, lost in my thoughts, the sound of the snow tires on the pavement, the heater fan, the engine. The instrument cluster glows pale green in the darkness that fills the car, the darkness that makes the night.

Two thousand miles and more beneath my feet,

the road,

the night,

spins the Earths fiery heart.

The dynamo.

Down, down, down,

where liquid nickel iron flows like blood,

electricity is surging in currents and tides.

mega amperes?

giga amperes?

tera amperes?

Two of Maxwell’s equations - RSS version - A (Very ) Basic Idea. No Variables, No Numbers.

Current (electrons) moving through a conductor will induce / create a magnetic field around that conductor, which field strength will be proportional to the total current (number of electrons).

A magnetic field moving through a conductor, (or a conductor moving through a magnetic field), will induce a current in that conductor which is proportional to the strength of the field and the cross section of the conductor. (Which creates a new magnetic field around that conductor, which induces another current, which creates another magnetic field... which... which… which....)

It has always seemed tautologous to me, but it works.

Electro-Magnetism. Janus. Two faces. One coin.

The earths spinning, burning, seething heart, is a great electromagnet.

Its field lines arcing pole to pole (a magnetosphere),

shields us from the lethal breath of our Sun.

Driving through the field induces electric current in the metal of my car. I’m stealing energy from the heart of the earth, slowing the heartbeat, cooling the core. (If only little, little, bit.)

Windward, sunward, the solar gale pushes the magnetosphere inward, toward the surface of the Earth. Leeward the solar gale, dragging the flux downwind, stretches it into a long teardrop, its shape continuously shifting as the solar wind gusts and eddies, as flux lines and charged particles collide and interact.

The magnetic field of our Sun, reaching forever outward

- for magnetisms range, like gravity’s, is infinite -

teases and tickles the field of the Earth.

The great cloud also has a magnetic field.

Some fields, repel.

Others, attract.

Connect.

Le nuage est arrive′.

Aurora - Part 1

Begin -

With spacetime.

Add one proton + one electron -

call it hydrogen.

(many x any x many) ^n

So now, hydrogen clouds, in spacetime, drifting.

Should a cloud be denser, there spacetime begins to bend and distort,

creating a low spot, a valley, a well.

+ potential energy +

The clouds drift down into these low spots, valleys, wells.

More + more.

(Matter tells spacetime how to bend -

spacetime tells matter how to move.)

The valleys walls become, steeper,

the gravity wells, deeper.

The clouds fall, faster.

Forming -

First, a disc.

Then, in the center,

a sphere.

Which is -

the largest possible volume

within

the smallest possible surface.

The atoms cannot all be the center,

but they all want to be the center,

(you know people like that),

so they pack tighter,

and tighter,

and tighter,

until finally -

Ignition.

* * *

The First Stars

Live Hard!

Burn Fast!

Die Young!

Ride interstellar Harley Panhead Suicide Shifters with Ape Hangers!

Have Flaming Hearts tattooed on their brawny arms!

Fill their bellies with helium fused from the primal hydrogen which gave them life!

Then fuse the helium into ever heavier elements - up to iron!

(In layers like an onion!)

Growing ever more bloated!

Until they Explode!

Spewing their guts across the Universe!

In their catastrophic final moments forging the elements heavier than iron!

(But the math for that escapes me.)

Requiescat in Pace.

(We are but one of the end products of cosmic indigestion on a colossal scale.)

Nonetheless, De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Time,

oh so elusive,

passes...

And new discs form.

New Galaxies,

give birth to new stars,

smaller stars,

more stable stars,

longer lived stars.

Stars surrounded by -

Planets.

Small rocky planets,

gas giant planets,

many many planets,

condensed and aggregated from the remains of those first stars.

The life givers.

And on this planet,

our planet,

life arose.

* * *

Question: "What is it like in the heart of a star?"

Short answer: "Very very hot!"

Longer answer?

Imagine...

Imagine you are a subatomic particle,

a proton, neutron, electron, photon,

whatever,

In Times Square, New York City,

On New Years Eve.

The crowd density?

(everyone else is a subatomic particle, proton, neutron, photon, whatever, too.)

Think Times Square ^3 (cubed)

Because it's not just any New Years Eve,

It's 11:59:59 PM, 1999!

Waiting for the ball to drop.

Such a crush that you can't move the width of an atomic nucleus,

in any direction,

without bumping into,

or bouncing off of,

someone,

or something.

(Yes, neutrinos cross faster. But they cheat.)

Now -

Cross Times Square.

"Excuse me, pardon me... Oops, sorry. Excuse me. No, I don't want to dance... Oh, all right."

To reach the other side you must work your way through the photon crowd.

Free electrons, atomic nuclei, billiard bouncing neutrons, miscellaneous particles.

The odd quark.

(All quarks are odd)

The deafening roar.

"Want some?"

"Some what? What? What is that? Jack Daniels? No, thank you, oh... well... I am kind of dry., you know... maybe just a little. Thanks."

It's a long, slow, but not uninteresting journey -

there is, after all, a tremendous amount of sex going on all around you.

(Where do you think all the heavier elements come from? Hmmm?)

Ten thousand years -

One hundred thousand years -

to work your way through this New York, New Years, roiling, seething, crowd.

So many years to the other side,

to the surface.

Ten thousand years,

One hundred thousand years,

to the face of the star,

and freedom.