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This film was written and directed by Claude Lelouch. You say the name means nothing to you? Do you remember a film called A Man and a Woman, with the most annoying film score ever recorded? Lelouch didn’t write the music, but he wrote and directed that movie – when I was in high school! And I’m so old that when I was a kid there wasn’t even matter yet, just radiation. Even after the universe started to cool, my parents were too poor to afford matter. They had to scrimp and save to surprise me for my third birthday. My present was a molecule.
And even then, the money wasn’t enough. My godfather had to pull some strings to get my present, because “Johnny’s First Molecule” was the hot toy that holiday season.
A helium hydride molecule was the Tickle Me Elmo of the early universe.
Anyway, ol’ Lelouche had already been making films nine years before A Man and a Woman, so that guy is so old you can’t even calculate his age as a time measurement, because when he was born, time as we know it had not yet begun.
(I guess that would be more impressive if the new film were scored higher than 4.9 at IMDb.)
What this thread is missing is the latest bachelor beaver news. “Single beaver caused mass internet, cell service outages in Northern B.C.” His beaver buddies be like “Oh, hell gnaw, Daryl, get yourself a girl and stop fuckin’ shit up. We couldn’t log on worth a dam!”
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/single-beaver-caused-mass-internet-cell-service-outages-in-northern-b-c-1.5944697?s=09
It was the greatest internet outage caused by a beaver since Katie Holmes in The Gift.
There was a beaver in that movie?
Good writing. Even if it suggests chemistry isn’t your strength.
Chemistry isn’t my field, but when I write riffs like that I always make sure to get the underlying facts correct, even if I have no idea how those conclusions were determined.
“At about 100,000 years after the big bang, after the neutral helium atoms form, helium hydride is the first molecule.”
Fair enough.
I did mean something specific. I’ll take a swing at spelling it out. First, a quick click on the Helium hydride ion article from your Wiki link.
“It is stable in isolation, but extremely reactive, and cannot be prepared in bulk, because it would react with any other molecule with which it came into contact…
Since HeH+ cannot be stored in any usable form, its chemistry must be studied by forming it in situ…
HeH+ has long been conjectured since the 1970s to exist in the interstellar medium.” [It’s now been “discovered.”]
There are a lot of fanciful details in your tale. That’s why you reap the big bucks. I’m picking at one nit. My drift is, more or less, that it can’t be a Xmas gift. It can’t be wrapped, or even decorated. Yeah, I’m being silly.
Do you know the difference between a virtual particle & a “real” one? A particle is real if we ever detect it directly.
There are a lot of particles we claim to have detected that are always inferred from what else happens after they decay. Well, we do consider a neutrino to be “real,” as it’s radiated away & presumably lives, like, forever. But many of those we’ve “discovered” just break up too fast for us to catch them red-handed.
Next, do you know what the surface of the sun is? I mean, it’s a ball of gas. Why would it have a “surface”? Because it blocks light. We can’t see the light from whatever’s behind the sun. The sun’s “atmosphere” just gets continuously thinner with “altitude”. At the “surface” its gas density is less than what we call “one atmosphere.” Here on earth, our air is completely see-thru at sea level. What’s the diff?
Charge. Photons are blocked. Disrupted by EMF. There’s a phase change, actually gradual, in the descent into the sun, from gas to plasma. A plasma is a “hot” environment that breaks up all the molecules & ionizes all the atoms.
Once hot enough, only bare nuclei & free electrons, protons & neutrons remain. Dominantly, it’s a soup of net charge, currents & turbulence. Energy is conserved, but a photon doesn’t stand a chance. It’s toast. In a sense, every photon is “virtual.”
And let’s not think nuclei are safe, either. They’re broken up & reformed at some rate. You know, when a star stalls out, collapses & blows up, it’s not that it’s “used up all its fuel.” Far from it.
It may have seemed like it was “stable” for millions of years. But it was always delicately perched between the outward pressure from its core fusion & the sheer weight of all its contents. The fusion stalls out because of a tiny bit of pollution. After hydrogen fuses, the helium nucleus it makes is a pollutant. It intercepts the fast protons & neutrons flying around. Average speed goes down a tick, fusion slows a smidge, outward pressure falls a tad. You get the picture. Eventually…
Sudden core collapse.
“Months of boredom, then, seconds of terror.”
Anyway, in my book, no ion is “stable.” It can be in a protected environment, sure. But that’s not a thing about the ion itself, now, is it? Hey, YMMV.
Yes.
And obviously there could not be an X-mas gift some 13+ billion years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
And obviously my family and I could not have existed in a universe without matter.
And obviously I could not have had a godfather some 13+ billion years before any species known to us had conceived of a god.
None of those points in the joke represent ignorance on my part. They are deliberate scientific absurdities advanced to create a few laughs, as in “Yo mama so fat the only belt she can wear is Van Allen’s.”
Yup. Why I was “silly.”
And I meant it as a chide, which tend to be elliptical. And not as a scold.
Hrmpf. So much bad comes from conflict expected, to spoil the good in our moods & intentions.
FWIW, to your professed ignorance, I mean, disclaimer of expertise. My understanding is like yours, with some narrative connective tissue, and dotted with little epiphanies. A zillion such devil-in-the-details facts separate me from a real physicist.
I’m nowhere near even this meager place in chem, bio & today’s very relevant biochem. I forgot most of what I once knew in those subjects. But physics meets them in astrophysics & cosmology in the large, & in particle physics in the small. There are parallels & connections between them, & I recall parts of them thru these ties.
(I did read fair amounts of Gould & Dawkins, tho.)
A pet detail from a physics post: Transparency. It’s, let’s say, a little miracle that air “lets light thru.” It has to do with what light it absorbs & how it’s re-emitted, together with conservation of momentum. Plus the kind of photons we’re talking about, ie, where they come from: the sun, mainly.
Relatedly, what do we mean by “empty space?” Turns out, this too has to do with transparency. Another bit of magic. Space is empty only in the sense that photons go thru it unimpeded. Light travels in “the void” at “the speed of light.” A primordial photon can cross billions of light-years of space, slightly the worse for wear (“red-shift”), but intact. This, in turn, is because, as it happens, “the void” doesn’t hold net electric charge. Ref my earlier comment.
The same is not true of “the vacuum” WRT any other species in the particle zoo (or type of charge). We did use to think the neutrino was massless, like the photon. It does go thru vacuum at almost the speed of light. Those two claims, BTW, are equivalent. And, of course, we have to qualify. At the grand scale, the EM field lines are negligible because weak enough or cancel out.
No one knows why any of these things. The standard model just posits them as brute facts. Everything all has to come out the way it does, because. It may be a “miracle.” Physicists may call such facts “accidents.” It’s no accident they’re our theory, tho. Experimental facts, we know. Theory bends to fit. Peace.
For clarity: When I said, “YMMV,” I meant the opposite take is also viable. It all hinges on what environment we pick as “normal.” Arguably, “the interstellar medium,” ie, empty space, is the most natural “normal.” It dominates our universe, on the whole.
OTOH, normal to us is what we’re familiar with. So, plays to our biases. Accordingly, we take our puny view, as a matter of routine. And, no apology. 🙂