Moby Photon

My Life Story

Loomings of the Sun’s Core

Call me Photon. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no visible light in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in the sun’s core, I thought I would move about a little and see the earthy part of the universe. This is the story of my life, and my long (about 50 million years) and treacherous journey to the earth.

I will begin at the time of my birth. There now is your insular city of the sun’s core, belted round by zones as Indian isles by coral reeves –the radiation zone surrounds it with her hot solar material. Right and left, the streets take you towards the ocean of outer space. Within this core, protons are running around at high speeds. Every second, they convert themselves into helium. My parents were protons. They created me through hydrogen fusion: their nuclei fused, releasing my siblings, a positron and a deuteron. Then a few more protons came into the mix, and you arrive at helium-3, then helium-4, then me, as a gamma ray. This all incorporates the law of E=mc^2. It means than energy is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared. A bit complicated, I know, but this is why I always go to sea as a sailor, and not as a nuclear physicist.

The Carpetbag

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpetbag, tucked it under my arm, and started for outer space. Unfortunately, it was a longer journey than I had anticipated. Quitting the good old city of the sun’s core, I duly arrived in the Radiation Zone. It was on a Saturday night in December, but it wasn’t cold at all because the solar material there is really hot and dense. Much was I disappointed that there was no way of reaching the next zone until Monday –but not next Monday, a Monday several million years hence.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of the journey outward stop at this same Radiation Zone, I wasn’t lonely. In fact, within the zone were millions of other photons. They looked rather chaotic, all running around at the speed of light and bouncing off of one another. Strange! I decided I had to get out of there, so I after many years of “random walking”, I finally reached the edge. I really wish I could have walked in a straight line, but my bag was weighing me down, so I just bounced around for a while, until radiation waves finally pushed me on.

I was now in the city of the Convective Zone. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the signs of various hotels. They formed a granulation in the city. Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Thermal Column”, there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted packed snow and ice…in fact, it had. This heat cheered me, and carried me all the way to my next destination: the Photosphere Inn.

The Photosphere Inn

Entering that gable-ended Photosphere Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots. The inn was next to a harbor, full of ships.

Being the thick, visible surface of the sun, there’s a lot to take in while in the photosphere. But what most puzzled and confounded me was a pair of long, limber, portentous, black masses of something hovering in the center of the harbor. They were sunspots, one positive, and one negative. Granted, they weren’t really black, but they were a much cooler temperature compared to the bright matter around them, and looked dark. I saw many other photons swarming towards them. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Or was it the sunspot itself? There was a sort of unimaginable magnetic field about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous spot meant. Of course I didn’t want this to happen to me, so I stayed away from it.

Sunset

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale fires, where’er I sail. This lovely light, it lights me. But I suppose I am getting ahead of myself. The place where I found my ship was the Chromosphere. It is called this because of the colorful flares it produces during total solar eclipses. It was getting hotter as I moved to the edges, so I quickly went to the Corona, a harbor that also served as the outer atmosphere of the sun. It is a transition zone between the sun and the sea of space. While here, I found my ship: The Coronal Mass Ejection. I could have taken the Solar Wind or the Solar Flare, but the CME sort of swept me up. The natives crewing her were plasma. As a fellow sailor, I fit right in with those protons and electrons. We promptly set sail and headed towards earth, carrying a magnetic field. Then we passed through the earth’s magnetosphere in a geomagnetic storm. When we did this, people weren’t too upset, but if I have a feeling if I had postponed my journey about 100 years they would have been, because we would have interrupted radio transmission and caused some damage to power lines. Instead, they appreciated our entrance, because we came to earth in a blaze of light and color. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Scientifically, some of my fellow sailors and the electrons in the magnetosphere got excited, and began colliding into each other. This energy was released as light.

Dusk

Now, I exist near Alaska. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small goldfish has its glassy globe. I have the earth now too. I spend my days reflecting off the glittering waves as light, and waiting to hitch a ride with Captain Ahab. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great star of the sun shone on as it shone millions of years ago.

Works Cited

Hathaway, David. Solar Science. NASA. 18 Dec. 2006 <http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/chromos.shtml>.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. 1851. Montreal: Reader’s Digest Association, 1989.

“Photon.” Wikipedia. 17 Dec. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon>.

“Sun.” Wikipedia. 17 Dec. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Radiation_zone>.