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′.
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