Life In Runes
170 views · Published 15 December 2011 · 0:45 · Indexed 23 September 2026
Channel: D Loclynn · 2011 · Music
The Rune Gebo: When left to themselves, the forces of nature spontaneously convert matter to light. Stars like the Sun begin the job; Hawking's "quantum radiance" of black holes completes the transformation. Looking up at the night sky, we see that the entire galaxy is busy at the same task. And this is only the gravitational pathway - nucleosynthesis followed by supernova and quasar phenomena, followed by "quantum radiance". Two other major pathways converting matter to light exist, matter-antimatter annihilation via the electromagnetic force, and particle and proton decay via the interaction of the strong and weak forces. Almost all of the matter in the Universe has already been converted to light via electromagnetic annihilation with antimatter in the first moments of the Big Bang - only approximately one particle in ten billion of the original amount of matter remains. (Matter/antimatter annihilations continue today in the suppression of virtual particle pairs by the electromagnetic force, a maintenance activity protecting vacuum symmetry.) What we see today is just a minor "mopping up" operation, conducted by the remaining forces along two fronts: the "social" or gravitational tactic, the conversion of matter to light in great masses (stars); and the "individual" tactic of particle and proton decay involving the strong and weak forces. Between these four pathways, not a single atom of matter will escape an eventual transformation to light. But the Sun is the ancient, obvious, intuitive, and archetypical example; the others we have only recently discovered through the rational achievements of our science. John A. Gowan http://www.johnagowan.org/index.html
