The Quantacized Atom

This is the third of four lectures on a rather difficult subject -- the theory of quantum electrodynamics -- and since there are obviously more people here tonight than there were before, some of you haven't heard the other two lectures and will find this lecture incomprehensible. Those of you who have heard the other two lectures will also find this lecture incomprehensible, but you know that that's all right:  as I explained in the first lecture, the way we have to describe Nature is generally incomprehensible to us.

Richard P. Feynman, QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, p. 77 [Princeton University Press, 1985]

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Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Neils Bohr

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If it is correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science.

Albert Einstein

In 1913 Niels Bohr proposed that the lines in the spectrum of Hydrogen could be explained if electrons could only assume certain energy states in the atom, states which corresponded to quantacized values of angular momentum. The classical definition of angular momentum is mass times velocity times distance from the center of circular motion (kg*m/s*m = m²*kg/s). This turns out to be the units of Planck's Constant (h), which can also be expressed in units of energy times time (J*s).

Thus, each electron will only have angular momentum (l) values that are an integer times Planck's Constant divided by 2π (the number of radians in a circle; h/2π is often expressed as the "reduced Planck's Constant," ℏ -- a symbol used by Paul Dirac).

The spectral lines of hydrogen result when an electron drops from one angular momentum state to a lower one and releases energy. The energy is then emitted as a photon, a quantum of electro-magnetic radiation, as explained by Albert Einstein in 1905 (the "photo-electric effect"), at a frequency and wavelength proportional to its energy, according to Planck's equation, E = νh = hc/λ, where c is the velocity of light, ν is the frequency (¹/s, Hz), λ is the wavelength (m), and c = νλ.

Bohr's equation for hydrogen is as follows, where n and n' are integer values for the level that the electron is leaving (n) and the level to which the electron is falling (n').

The additional constants are the electrostatic force constant (k) and the mass (m_e) and charge (e) of the electron. Evaluating the equation simply gets us a quantity of 912 times the factor , with the quantum integers, in units of length as Angstroms (Å = 10^-10 m).

When electrons drop down to the lowest quantum level, where angular momentum is zero, they emit photons in the ultra-violet part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the "Lyman" series of spectral lines. As n becomes indefinitely large, will tend to unity. Thus, an electron falling into the atom, to the lowest energy state, will emit of a photon of 912 Å.

On the other hand, an electron already at the lowest energy state will be knocked completely out of the atom by a photon of 912 Å. A hydrogen atom is thus "ionized" (H⁺), and the energy of a 912 Å photon is therefore the "ionization energy." That would be 2.179 x 10^-18 J (E = hc/λ), but it is usually expressed in "electron volts": 13.6 eV.

By comparison, to break apart a proton and a neutron bonded together (a "deuteron," the nucleus of a "deuterium" hydrogen atom) by the strong nuclear force, requires 2.224 MeV (3.563 x 10^-13 J), or 163,529 times as much energy. A photon that energetic would have a wavelength of 557 fm (Fermis), well into the gamma radiation (γ) part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When electrons drop down to the second lowest quantum level (n' = 2), they emit photons in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we perceive as visible light. This is the "Balmer" series of spectral lines. The lowest energy jump (3 to 2), produces a photon with the wavelength of 6560 Å, which is a bright red line in the spectrum of Hydrogen, usually called the "hydrogen alpha" (Hα) line.

This red light is one of the conspicuous colors of the universe, since atoms of hydrogen glow with this red color when excited. That contributes a bright red line to the spectra of most stars; and "bright" nebulae in galaxies tend to be red from the excited hydrogen, blue from scattered starlight, or purple from a combination of the two. As n becomes indefinitely large, will tend to n'², or simply 4. Thus, an electron falling into the atom, to the second lowest energy state, will emit of a photon of 3650 Å, just over in the UV-A part of the spectrum.

The "Paschen" and "Brackett" series both produce spectral lines in the Infrared, as electrons drop down to the third (n' = 3) and fourth (n' = 4) energy levels of the hydrogen atom. As n becomes indefinitely large, will tend to n'², which means simply 9 and 16, respectively, which gives us the ionization wavelengths from the respective energy levels.

While Bohr's model of the atom could account for spectral lines, it still could not account for why electrons had quantacized angular momentum in atoms and why electrons could be in orbit in atoms, which would involve acceleration around the nucleus, without radiating away all their energy, which accelerated electrical charges do. This means that the little models of atoms we always see, with electrons in orbits like planets, is impossible. The atom could simply not be a little solar system, based on charge rather than gravity, since electrons, on classical principles, would lose energy and fall into the nucleus. An accelerated change always radiates energy, and an electron that changes its direction of motion, its vector, is accelerated.

An answer to these questions was offered by Prince Louis de Broglie in 1923 with the theory that, as Einstein had introduced the idea that light could behave like both waves and particles, perhaps particles of matter could also behave like waves. Thus, electrons in an atom were not moving in orbits but filled an orbit as standing waves. Familiar electromagnetic radiation, like light, exists as traveling waves, moving through space at the velocity of light.

A standing wave does not move, but vibrates between fixed points, like the string on a violin. The sine wave at right represents a whole wavelength. It has a portion with a positive magnitude, a portion with a negative magnitude, and a node, which has zero magnitude. The ends of the wave, which also have zero magnitude, are usually not considered to be nodes. Half a wavelength would have no nodes; one and a half wavelengths, two nodes; and two whole wavelengths, three nodes.

A one dimensional wave has nodes that are points, and it vibrates into two dimensions. Similarly, a two dimensional wave, like a wave of water on the ocean, has nodes that are lines, and it vibrates into three dimensions. A three dimensional wave, which is what electrons in an atom would be, has nodes that are surfaces. Such surfaces can be planes, cones, or spheres. By analogy, we might want to say that a three dimensional wave would vibrate into four dimensions, but this aspect of the matter does not seem have been much discussed or explored, since we would then need to specify what that fourth dimension is. If we say "time," as in the fourth dimension of space-time, it is not clear that this suits the case, so the whole issue is embarrassingly, if not dishonestly, avoided.

In electron waves, each non-spherical node represents a quantum of angular momentum. Thus, a half wavelength, with no non-spherical nodes, is 0 angular momentum; a full wavelength, with one non-spherical node, is ℏ angular momentum; a wavelength and a half, with two non-spherical nodes, is 2ℏ angular momentum; etc.

At it happens, the atom turned out to be a bit more complicated than Bohr's original atom of 1913. Each level of energy contains, not only a new integer quantum of angular momentum, but all the smaller quanta of angular momentum as well. Each energy level in an atom is distinguished, however, by the absolute number of nodes, spherical and otherwise. Thus, the first energy level, with no nodes, has only one form, with 0 angular momentum. Since the shape of the standing wave is spherical, it is called an S orbital.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle allows two electrons into the orbital, one with positive spin and one with negative. In the Periodic Table of the elements, that completes the first row, with Hydrogen and Helium filling up the energy level.

The second energy level has one node. This can be either spherical, which means a spherical standing wave with a hidden spherical node inside (another S orbital), or a plane. A plane node gives us an angular momentum of ℏ. The plane node cuts the orbital in two, separating a side of positive magnitude from a side of negative magnitude. Such a wave is then called a P orbital. Now we get a further complication. An asymmetrical node produces an angular momentum vector.

In classical physics, that vector can assume any orientation; but, as we might suspect, this doesn't happen the same way in quantum mechanics. The vector is quantacized and can only assume certain orientations:  2l + 1 , which is all integer values from +l to -l. These different vectors make a physical difference when an atom is placed in a magnetic field. The orbiting electrons produce a magnetic field, where the angular momentum vector produces a magnetic vector, which then assumes different orientations in an ambient field. The different vector orientations are thus called "magnetic substates" of angular momentum.

In a P orbital, the magnetic substates are +1, 0, and -1. In the 0 substate, the vector is conventionally regarded as perpendicular to the z axis, and the node is thus the xy plane, symmetrical around the z axis. In the +1 and -1 substates, the nodes are the xz and yz planes. Since each substate can contain two electrons, the P orbital can contain 6 electrons overall. The second energy level thus has one S and one P orbital, and can hold 8 electrons. This row in the Periodic Table starts with Lithium and ends with Neon, which has an atomic number of 10. That is then the second of the "magic numbers," the atomic numbers where the energy levels have filled up, producing the particular chemical stability that we see in the Inert Gases.

The third energy level is characterized by 2 nodes. This can occur as an S orbital with two spherical nodes, a P orbital with one plane and one spherical node, and a new kind of orbital, the D. The two nodes of the D orbital occur in different ways. To be symmetrical around the z axis in the 0 magnetic substate, two cones are necessary, one below the xy plane, one above.

We can also understand these cones to be produced by the rotation, around the z axis, of two lines that pass through the origin. This divides the wave into three lobes, one above the xy plane, one below the xy plane, and then a ring that is wrapped around the z axis in the xy plane. The +1 and -l magnetic substates are then characterized by one plane node that is symmetrical around the z axis in the xy plane and another plane that occupies the xz or the yz planes.

The +2 and -2 magnetic substates then have two plane nodes, which intersect each other along the z axis, dividing the wave into four different parts. The first D orbital (3d), which can contain 10 electrons, however, turns out to have an energy comparable to the S (4s) and P (4p) orbitals in the fourth energy level. It fills up, then, only in row four of the Periodic Table, which goes from Potassium to Bromine (where the magic number is 36). This delay in filling the "higher" orbitals is characteristic of the Periodic Table, but it does occur fairly regularly. The D orbitals correspond to the "transition metals" in the Periodic Table.

Only one more kind of orbital occurs with electrons in atoms, the F orbital, which has an angular momentum of 3ℏ, allows for 7 magnetic substates, and so will hold 14 electrons. The nodes are all combinations of cones and planes, analogous to the D orbital described above. An F orbital (4f) does not begin to fill until row 6 of the Period Table, giving us the first Rare Earth series. By the time we get to the second Rare Earth series (5f), the elements are so unstable that most only exist artificially. Their chemistry is mostly not really a practical question.

When electrons are thought of as orbiting the atomic nucleus like planets do the sun, what the nucleus itself is doing is a question that may not even occur. However, when we realize that the electrons are not "orbiting" but only occupying energy levels as standing waves, and that electrons in S orbitals, which have no nodes passing through the geometrical origin, can thus be found in the nucleus, we should realize that the protons and neutrons in nuclei must occupy energy levels, and so orbitals comparable to the electrons, themselves.

There are some complications with nuclear orbitals, however. Protons and neutrons are different particles and so occupy their own respective sets of orbitals. The nuclear force, by which protons and neutrons are attracted to each other (they are hadrons and baryons), observes "parity," which ends up meaning that each energy level can contain even or odd quantities of angular momentum, not both.

The second energy level, therefore, with an angular momentum of ℏ, contains the familiar P orbital but no S orbital. This means that much higher level orbitals get filled up for the same number of elements by protons (up to I orbitals, with 6ℏ angular momentum).

This goes up even higher with neutrons, which accumulate faster than protons. In the heaviest known elements, neutrons are thus filling J orbitals, with 7ℏ angular momentum. Nuclear orbitals, like the electrons in the atoms, also fill up at different levels than one would expect.

This is complicated by two factors:  One that it works differently for protons and neutrons; and the other that we have a phenomenon called the "spin-orbital interaction" by which particles with positive spin and particles with negative spin become separated from each other and fill at different times, producing very different "magic numbers" for stable nuclei than occur for electrons in nuclei.

The G, H, I, and J orbitals become increasingly complicated. Only the G orbitals, with an angular momentum of 4ℏ, and 9 magnetic substates, are shown at right. These are all superimposed on each other, of course, in the atomic nucleus, as the electron orbitals occupy the volume of the atom.

The previous diagrams have illustrated the nodal planes and cones for the different states of angular momentum. The diagram at left illustrates the angular momentum vector for 4ℏ, at the magnetic substate of m=+2. This diagram nicely demonstrates the principle that in each magnetic substate we actually have the same quantity of angular momentum. In relation to the z axis, however, there are nine different substates, as only a partial vector appears in that dimension.

Since angular momentum concerns circular motion, it may seem a little strange that such motion should have a "vector," which indicates direction. In Classical physics, however, we determine the angular momentum vector with the "right handed rule":  if the curled fingers of the right hand point in the direction of the circular motion, the right thumb points in the direction of the vector. For particles with 1/2 spin, they have magnetic substates of either +1/2 or -1/2, where the vectors will simply be up or down. [I have adapted this diagram elsewhere to demonstrate ideas in the metaphysics of the polynomic system of value.]

Two further complications:  The waves shown are the "real" part (using real numbers) of the wave function. There is also the imaginary part of the wave function, using imaginary numbers (√ -1 = i). What the physical significance of this is is a good question. On the other hand, the physical significance of the real wave function is also a good question.

Werner Heisenberg and, again, Niels Bohr regarded the wave function as a "probability cloud":  The square of the wave function gives a distribution for the probability of finding the electron as a particle. The wave function collapses into an actual location for the particle when an attempt is made to observe the particle.

The idea that the observation creates the reality is Bohr's classic "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics. However, it seems inescapable that the wave function is a real and physical thing, since only a wave phenomenon can account for the interference effects that can be observed with radiation and with particles.

That kind of quantum mechanics, which still observes Bohr's principle of Complementarity, but allows for two different levels of reality, seems best accommodated by a Kantian dualism of phenomena and things-in-themselves. The standing wave electrons, protons, and neutrons thus occupy real space and account for the physical size of atoms and nuclei. As long as the atom or the nucleus maintains its integrity, the waves persist; but an experimental or observational intervention to locate individual particles collapses the waves and does produce discreet locations for the particles, breaking up the atoms.

The metaphysical aspects of all this now seem to involve some embarrassment and discomfort in physics. In both books and documentaries recently, I have noticed an absence of real discussion about the wave/particle duality or Complementarity. Physicists to whom the wave function is real, like de Broglie or Erwin Schrödinger, may simply be ignored, let alone have their viewpoints discussed -- with Schrödinger's Cat doing what cats often do, which is to intrude itself awkwardly into discussions where it is not welcome.

The anti-realism of the Copenhagen Interpretation may be insensibly assumed, without being properly explained either. Narrators may introduce the existence of a "probability cloud" of particles without any honest discussion of what that means, even while implying that that is some kind of physical object.

Physicists may profess agnositism about what it all really means, but the truth is that philosophers, who despised metaphysics for most of the 20th Century, have not been doing their job and have left the paradoxes of quantum mechanics to the physicists, who in turn have no background, information, or understanding of the metaphysical issues. In a sense, because the math works, they want all the rest to just go away.

Bibliography

Jerry B. Marion, Physics, The Foundation of Modern Science, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1973

Hans Frauenfelder & Ernest M. Henley, Subatomic Physics, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1990

P.W. Atkins, Quanta, A Handbook of Concepts, Oxford University Press, 1991

W.S.C. Williams, Nuclear and Particle Physics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991

"Einstein's Quantum Riddle," NOVA, January 9, 2019, WGBH Educational Foundation, 2018

Kantian Quantum Mechanics

Richard Feynman's Quantum Mechanics

Philosophy of Science, Physics

Philosophy of Science

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2008, 2012, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Quanta, Note; the Fermi

A femtometer (fm), 10^-15 m, can also be called a "Fermi," since that scale, the approximate size of a proton, is useful for nuclear dimensions, as the Angstrom (Å = 10^-10 m) is for atomic dimensions. Indeed, the radius of an atomic nucleus is roughly equal to 1.2*A^1/3 fm, where "A" is the atomic mass number, the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Mass numbers (A or B) can be found in the Period Table of the Elements.

The Angstrom unfortunately is now passing out of usage, since it is not part of the basic SI units. Nanometers (1 nm = 10^-9 m) are coming to be used instead. This is unfortunate. Since Fermis are roughly the diameter of the nucleus and Angstroms are roughly the diameter of the atom, this gives us a good sense of scale. There are five orders of magnitude between the two units. That is a rough difference of 100,000 between nuclei and atoms. So if a Fermi were a millimeter, an Angstrom would be 100 meters.

This means that a sense of the scale of an atom would be like dropping a BB in the middle of a football field. No cartoon representation of an atom can give a feel for that. Indeed, besides the absurd misproportion of scale, such cartoons always show electrons orbiting atoms, which is also a misrepresentation.

Electrons cannot move in their "orbitals," or they would radiate energy and the atom would collapse, as we see in the "Quantacized Atom" treatment above. The only thing that makes physical sense is that the electrons in the atoms take the form of waves, specifically standing waves, which both fill space and do not move. While I am not alone is drawing this conclusion, I have yet to see it expressed in popular presentations of physics. Instead, we get representations like the animation above, which gives us totally wrong ideas about the nature of atoms.

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Return to "Units of Measurement" text

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Units of Measurement

1024	yetta	Y
1021	zetta	Z
1018	exa	E
1015	peta	P
1012	tera	T
109	giga	G
106	mega	M
104	myria	my
103	kilo	k
102	hecto	h
101	deka	da dk
10-1	deci	d
10-2	centi	c
10-3	milli	m
10-6	micro	μ
10-9	nano	n
10-12	pico	p
10-15	femto	f
10-18	atto	a
10-21	zepto	z
10-24	yocto	y

The Metric System of 1795
length	metre	m
area	are	a	(10 m)2
volume	litre	l	1 dm3
	stere		1 m3
mass	gramme	g	1 cm3 water

The metric system as used by international agreement in science today is officially the "Système International d'Unités" (SI). Apart from the prefixes, shown at right, which have mostly simply been expanded from the original ones, the system of units is based on a fragment, indeed a version of a fragment, of the original metric system. Only one of the original units, the meter, is still part of the basic "official" system. The "stere" was a unit intended for firewood, and is not used at all, as far as I can tell. The "liter" and the "are" (usually the "hectare") are "unofficial" units that are simply based on the meter. The "gram" has now been demoted from a basic unit to a derived unit, derived from the "kilogram." But how a unit with a prefix becomes "basic" is curious.

At right are the prefixes, as they now stand (after expansions) to be used with basic units. Many of these are now common, some very unusual. One advantage of the metric prefixes is the unambiguous meaning; for in the traditional counting of large numbers, two systems have been used, the "short scale" and the "long scale." Thus, to Americans, a "billion" means a thousand millions, i.e. 1,000,000,000. This is the "short scale." On the "long scale," a "billion" means a million millions, i.e. 1,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 10¹²), while a thousand millions is only a "milliard." Americans count 10¹² as already a "trillion." For over a century, the "short scale" was used by the United States and France, while the "long scale" was used in Britain and Germany. In 1948, France switched to the "long scale" and thus joined Germany, Europe generally, and Latin America. However, Britain, despite switching to the metric system, adopted the "short scale" in 1974, which unified the usage in the English speaking world. The potential for confusion in this is considerable, which means that the metric prefixes have the advantage of clarity [cf. "The number name game," Science News, February 22, 2014, p.30].

The Basic S.I. Units
length	meter	m
mass	kilogram	kg
time	second	s
electric current	ampere	A	C/s
temperature	kelvin	K	oC + 273.15
amount of substance	mole	mol
luminous intensity	candela	cd
plane angle	radian	rad
solid angle	steradian	sr

One of the original problems of the metric system was the disparity in scale between the unit of length, the meter (m), and the unit of mass, the gram (g). Resolving this meant scaling down the meter or scaling up the gram. Both were done, and two rival systems emerged:  The "CGS," system, for "centimeter, gram, second," and the "MKS" system, for "meter, kilogram, second." The "second," of course, was accepted by all as the basic unit of time. The CGS system was popular for a long time in American science. Some of its units, like the dyne and the erg, are still encountered. However, the MKS was probably destined to dominate from the beginning. In the first place, the centimeter and the gram are probably too small to be convenient for most purposes. Second, there are some MKS units, like the Volt and Ampere, that simply do not have corresponding CGS units. Thus, some CGS units, such as the gauss, were defined in part through MKS units. So, to be as consistent as possible, the MKS system has become standard.

Obsolete CGS Units
acceleration	gal	cm/s2
force	dyne	cm*g/s2, 10-5 N
energy	erg	cm2*g/s2, 10-7 J
magnetic flux	maxwell	10-8 Wb
magnetic flux density	gauss	maxwell/cm2, 10-4 T

Consistency, however, is not always possible. Although the beauty of the metric system is its foundation on decimal values, which has sold it to every country in the world except the United States, and some other oddballs -- though even American customary units are officially defined in metric terms -- some customary units and strange usages have been retained or crept in for convenience. Most importantly, the systematization of decimal counting failed to anticipate the binary basis of modern computer technology. The powers of 2 now rival the powers of 10, and even metric prefixes have been corrupted. Thus, when the unit "kilobyte" ("kB" or just "K") is used, it usually does not really mean 1000 bytes of information. It means 1024 bytes, i.e. 2¹⁰. A "megabyte" ("MB" or "Meg") is not 1,000,000 bytes, but 1,048,576 bytes, i.e. 1024 x 1024 or 2²⁰. This situation contains the potential for serious and dangerous confusions. I am now informed that new prefixes have been proposed for a binary system, infixing, in fact, "ibi" between the decimal prefix and the SI unit -- "KibiB" would now be the binary "kilobyte." This would clear up the current situation, but it also reveals that the decimal preference at the foundations of the metric system is not always appropriate to the material at hand.

Derived Units, S.I. & "Customary" Metric
length	Angstrom	Å	10-10 m
	Fermi	fm	10-15 m
frequency	hertz	Hz	1/s
velocity			m/s
acceleration			m/s2
momentum			m*kg/s
angular momentum			J*s m2*kg/s
force	newton	N	m*kg/s2
energy	joule	J	N*m m2*kg/s2
power	watt	W	J/s V*A A2Ω m2*kg/s3
mass	metric ton	t	1000 kg
area	hectare	ha	(100 m)2
pressure	pascal	Pa	N/m2
electric charge	coulomb	C	A*s
electric current	ampere	A	C/s V/Ω
electric potential	volt	V	J/C A*Ω
electric resistance	ohm	Ω	V/A W/A2
electric capacitance	farad	F	C/V
electric conductance	siemens	S	A/V
magnetic flux	weber	Wb	V*s
magnetic flux density	tesla	T	Wb/m2
magnetic inductance	henry	H	Wb/A
luminous flux	lumen	lm	cd*sr
illuminance	lux	lx	lm/m2
radioactive activity	becquerel	Bq	1/s
radioactive dose	gray	Gy	J/kg

This transformation of a uniform system in fact happened before. Both ancient Egyptian and ancient Babylonian systems of measures were based on a uniform basis of counting, decimal (base 10) for the Egyptians and sexagesimal (base 60, with decimal numbers also) for the Babylonians. In fact, Babylonian 60's are still with us, unthreatened by the metric system, for seconds/minute, minutes/hour, and units of arc.

The ancient duodecimal (base 12) reckoning of day and night (giving 24 hours in a day) is also still with us and unthreatened. The complications that eventually produced things like the 5280 foot mile came from historical adaptations and the introduction of what seemed like "appropriate" units for different purposes, a process that continues, and not just with binary computer language. Indeed, the duodecimal twelves that turn up in many ancient and customary units, like the 12 inch foot, are arguably better than decimals, since 12 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6, twice as many factors as 10 (evenly divisible only by 2 and 5). This is certainly why twelves started being used, and probably will again. Meanwhile, everyone must do something that was never supposed to happen with the metric system:  remember that "kilo" means "1000" in one word and "1024" in another! -- a usage that may die hard even with the introduction of binary prefixes.

Finally, the table at left shows a great many official derived S.I. units, and a couple of "customary" metric units, like the metric ton and the hectare. These units fall into four broad categories:

Basic physical units, from frequency to pressure; Electric units, from charge to conductance; Magnetic units, from flux to inductance; and, Radiation units, from flux of light to a dose of radioactivity.

All these units all by themselves say a lot about the history of science and the structure of nature. The unit of force, named after Isaac Newton, is an artifact of Newton's equation F = ma, "force equals mass times acceleration." That volts and amperes can be multiplied together to give units of power, Watts, is something that everyone plugging things into an electrical outlet should know.

It is curious to reflect that while now in lingustics the value of customary usage reigns supreme, often resulting in the dimissal of educated, elevated, or traditionally grammatical speech as unnecessary, inauthentic, or the classist and oppressive tool of the capitalist patriarchy, just the opposite can be found in discussion of SI units, where even traditional metric units, like the convenient Ångstrom (10^-10m or 0.1 nm -- about the size of an atom), can be dismissed as archaic or reactionary. This difference is instructive. The variety of customary units resulted from the practice of those dealing with particular materials. Gold was thus weighed (and still is) in (troy) ounces rather than tons or kilograms. It is not often that anyone is going to get a ton of gold together. Although kitchen measures now are available in metric units, teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, etc. provided convenient, integer values for cooking. While 250ml is about a cup, the large integer betrays an origin foreign to the kitchen -- also now using a unit, the liter, that ironically is no longer an "official" SI unit. At the same time, the Celsius measurement of temperature (no longer a basic SI unit either) has no mathematical advantage over the Fahrenheit scale, but a disadvantage for daily usage in that its increments are almost twice as large, which more crudely represents temperatures within the range of meteorological experience.

Those who despise customary units as mediaeval nonsense are thus in the position of the kind of grammatical martinet who tells people who say, "It's me," that they should say, "It is I" (so Louis XIV perhaps should have said, "L'état c'est je"?). What is awkward is when inappropriate units are imposed because of the uncompromising rationalistic cookie-cutter, as in the case of milliliters in the kitchen; but what is dangerous is losing a multi-million dollar Mars spacecraft because the engineers mixed up metric with customary units. The appropriate units for science are the SI ones, and it is as inexcusable (and more) that JPL engineers should be using feet or miles as it is that metric enthusiasts should be disparaging tablespoons or Fahrenheit temperatures in daily usage. Custom, even elevated grammatical usage, is the result of need and usage. The fundamental inspiration of the metric system, however, was rationalistic and dictatorial. In life there is in fact a place for both, and it is wisdom to know the difference.

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Troy Weights

Light Years and Parsecs

Babylonian Numbers and Measure

Philosophy of Science

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Copyright (c) 1998, 2001, 2002, 2013, 2014 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Physical Constants

gravitational constant	G	6.673(10) x 10-11 N*m2/kg2
velocity of light	c	299,792,458 m/s
Planck's Constant	h	6.62606876(52) x 10-34 J*s
reduced Planck's Constant	h/2π	1.054571596(82) x 10-34 J*s
Planck Length	(hG/c3)1/2	4.0510 x 10-35 m
reduced Planck Length	(ℏG/c3)1/2	1.6160(12) x 10-35 m
Planck Time	(hG/c5)1/2	1.3513 x 10-43 s
Planck Mass	(hc/G)1/2	5.4560 x 10-8 kg
Planck Energy	(hc5/G)1/2	4.9036 x 109 J
Planck Temperature	(hc5/G)1/2/kb	3.5516 x 1032 K
Planck Acceleration	(c7/hG)1/2	4.9223 x 10102 m/s2
Planck Force	c4/G	1.2105 x 1044 N
tropical year	y	31,556,925.9747 s
Astronomical Unit	AU	149,597,892 km
Parallax Second	PC	206,264.806 AU
Light Year	LY	9,460,529,744,270 km
magnetic constant	μ0	4π x 10-7 N/A2
electrostatic force constant	k	8.987551788 x 109 N*m2/C2
permittivity of empty space, electric constant	1/μ0c2, 0	8.854187817 x 10-12 F/m
charge of an electron	e	1.6021917 x 10-19 C
electron volt	eV	1.6021917 x 10-19 J
mass of an electron	me	9.109558 x 10-31 kg
Boltzmann's constant	kb	1.380662 x 10-23 J/K
Stephan-Boltzmann Constant		5.67032x 10-8 W/m2/K4
constant in Wien's Law, second radiation constant	c2 = hc/k	0.01438786 m*K
Avogadro's number	N	6.02 x 1023 1/mol

I am intrigued that the "electrostatic force constant," which plays the same role in Coulomb's Law for electrostatic force that the gravitational constant does in Newton's equation for gravity, and which is given in Physics, The Foundation of Modern Science [by Jerry B. Marion, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1973], did not seem to be given in 62nd edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics [edited by Robert C. Weast and Melvin J. Astle, CRC Press, 1981]. I thought, "Isn't there some use for Coulomb's Law anymore?" Well, apparently there is, but the law gets written differently and a different constant is used:  the "permittivity constant." It is in different units, farads per meter (F/m), but this turns out to be equivalent to C²/N*m², the reciprocal of the units of the electrostatic force constant (times 4π). How that is used, and the rest of the constants, can be seen in Historic Equations in Physics and Astronomy. I now find the "permittivity" constant in the 83rd edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics [edited by David R. Lide, CRC Press, 2002] called simply the "electric constant."

The "Planck" units are of significance (1) as "natural" units of measurement, based on the Planck Constant, the velocity of light, and the Gravitational Constant (with Boltzmann's Constant used to convert the Planck Energy into the Planck Temperature), and (2) for the recent and promising physics of Strings and Super-Strings. The Planck Length is regarded as the smallest physically significant distance, below which is a quantum chaos. It is also regarded as the length of the strings in String theory. The Planck Length is the scale, and the Planck Time the age of the universe, at which gravity is thought to act like all the other forces of nature. Note that while the Planck Length and Planck Time are very small, other units, like the Planck Energy, the Planck Temperature, and the Planck Force, are rather large. A 100 Watt light bulb would expend the Planck Energy in 568 days. What this may mean is that at very small scales, high energies are needed (experimentally) to reveal the structures. The Planck Temperature may have some connection to the temperature of the Universe itself when, shortly after the Big Bang, its size was at the Planck Length.

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The Electromagnetic Spectrum

The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of types of electromagnetic radiation from the weakest radio waves to the strongest gamma rays. As described by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), electromagnetic waves are an electric field oscillating in one dimension, a magnetic field oscillating perpendicular to this, and then an electromagnetic wave traveling in the direction perpendicular to the other two at the velocity of light. The velocity of light, c, is now defined as exactly 299,792,458 m/s, where c = νλ:  ν is the frequency (¹/s, Hz) and λ is the wavelength (m).

Electromagnetic radiation is energy. For each quanta of radiation, for each photon, its energy is frequency times Planck's Constant:  E = νh = hc/λ. Planck's Constant (h) is 6.62606876(52) x 10^-34 J*s. Thus, the table below begins with a frequency of 3 Hz, so the energy of that photon is 19.88 x 10^-34 joules. How much is a joule of energy? Well, a Watt (W) is a power of 1 Joule/second. A 100 Watt lightbulb burns 100 joules every second. So the energy of a 3 Hz photon is infinitesimally small. It would not provide enough energy to power a 100 Watt lightbulb long enough that you would even notice.

By international agreement, the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is divided into bands based on powers of ten. For this purpose, the velocity of light is taken to be 300,000 km/s, the frequency is used in multiples of 3, and the wavelength then simply becomes multiples of 10. The first band is thus 3Hz to 30 Hz in frequency, corresponding to wavelengths of 100,000 km to 10,000 km.

band	ν = frequency	λ = wavelength	Use
1	3-30 Hz	100,000 km- 10,000 km	ELF
2	30-300 Hz	10,000-1000 km	SLF
3	300-3000 Hz	1000-100 km	ULF
4	3-30 kHz	100-10 km	VLF
5	30-300 kHz	10-1 km	LF/LW
6	300-3000 kHz	1000-100 m	MF/MW AM radio
7	3-30 MHz	100-10 m	HF/SW short wave radio
8	30-300 MHz	10-1 m	VHF TV/FM radio
9	300-3000 MHz	100-10 cm	UHF TV 30-10 cm Microwave
10	3-30 GHz	10-1 cm	SHF cm Microwave
11	30-300 GHz	10-1 mm	EHF mm Microwave
12	300-3000 GHz 0.3 THz-3 THz	1000-100 μm	THF, Terahertz Radiation
13	3-30 THz	100-10 μm	LWIR = 14.0-8.0 μm MWIR = 5.0-3.0 μm SWIR = 1.7-0.9 μm
14	30-300 THz	10-1 μm
15	300-3000 THz	10,000-1000 Å 1000-100 nm
			Light = 7600-4000 Å
			UVA = 4000-3150 Å UVB = 3150-2800 Å UVC = 2800-150 Å
16	3-30 PHz	1000-100 Å 100-10 nm
17	30-300 PHz	100-10 Å 10-1 nm	Soft X-rays
18	300-3000 PHz	10-1 Å 1-0.1 nm 1000-100 pm
19	3-30 EHz	1-0.1 Å 100-10 pm	Hard X-rays
20	30-300 EHz	0.1-0.01 Å 10-1 pm	γ radiation
21	300-3000 EHz	1000-100 fm

This is the ELF band, for "extremely low frequency." Subsequent bands use the prefixes S, "super," U, "ultra," and V, "very." In the center of the radio spectrum are the LF, "low frequency" band, also called LW, "long wave," the MF, "middle frequency" band, also called MW, "middle wave," and the HF, "high frequency" band, also called SW, "short wave."

AM radio in the MF band, short wave radio in the HF band, and FM radio in the VHF band are the most familiar forms of radio broadcasting. The UHF band contains some television broadcast frequencies, but at about 30 cm we get into microwaves, which are roughly classified into centimeter and millimeter wavelengths, corresponding to the SHF and EHF bands, respectively. Beyond microwaves, we get into infrared light, at micrometer wavelengths, and here there is no reason not to extend the radio wave system of classification by bands.

This puts visible light right into the middle of band 15, with a fair amount of infrared and ultraviolet on both sides. Wavelengths of light are traditionally given in Angstroms (Å), but nanometers (nm) are becoming more common, since Angstroms are not part of the official SI, "Système International," metric system. This strikes me as silly.

Photographs, on old fashioned film, could be made with infrared light up to wavelengths of about 1.3 micrometers (1.3 μm, 13,000-6800 Å). At longer wavelengths, infrared light given off simply by warm objects can be detected with electronic equipment. For such purposes, infrared is now divided into "Long Wave," LWIR (14.0-8.0 μm), "Middle Wave," MWIR (5.0-3.0 μm), and "Short Wave," SWIR (1.7-0.9 μm), infrared, "IR." These devices are different from "night vision" goggles, which simply amplify available light.

Band 12 is part of the infrared spectrum but its wavelengths are beyond the sensitivity of current IR devices. Even much of Band 13 is beyond LWIR. The THF of Band 12 is read as "Tremendously High Frequency." It can be regarded as constituting the "Terahertz Gap" between microwaves and infrared.

Ultraviolet wavelengths are now divided into three, A, B, and C, stretching very nearly to the end of band 16. UVB rays are mainly what cause sunburns. UVC rays are mostly absorbed by the ozone in the atmosphere. Artificial UVC rays are produced by some sources, like welding torches, but are deliberately created to sterilize food, air, and surfaces. On the Moon or Mars, UVC radiation in the open is dangerous. The loss of its magetic field, the loss of its atmosphere, and its loss of any possible ozone meant that UVC would have killed any young life on Mars. But UVA rays are warming and may age the skin but are otherwise harmless.

At Band 17 we pick up the X-rays, which go down to a hundredth of an Angstrom, or a picometer (pm). Shorter wavelengths are gamma radiation (γ), given in femtometers (fm) or "Fermis." There are shorter wavelengths of gamma radiation and cosmic rays beyond band 21, but it is there that we run out of metric prefixes for the frequency, offering a convenient place to stop -- although the prefixes have now been expanded beyond "exa" (E), 10¹⁸, to "zetta" (Z), 10²¹, and "yetta" (Y), 10²⁴.

To zero in on the part of the spectrum of most interest to us, visible light in Band 15, we can take advantage of a couple of coincidences of nature:

1. Visible light occupies slightly less than one octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. the longest wavelengths (c. 7600 Å) of visible light are slightly less than twice the length of the shortest wavelengths (c. 4000 Å); and,
2. The musical note A below middle C is set by convention at a frequency of 440.0 Hz; and 440.0 terahertz (THz) is near the end of the red frequencies of visible light. (My thanks to the dear departed and sorely missed Issac Asimov for his discussion of the musical frequencies.)

The table at right, with frequencies and wavelengths, is upside down in comparison to the table of electromagnetic frequencies above. It covers two full octaves above and below middle C. At the top it starts in the ultraviolet. Indeed, it includes the entire UVA part of the spectrum. At the bottom, it is well into the Infrared, including the boundary between Band 15 and Band 14. These infrared frequencies can all be photographed. We see the beginning of the "Short Wave Infrared" at 9000 Å, however odd it seems that any part of the intfrared spectrum should be called "short wave."

As a list of music notes, this gives us some sense of how little we actually can see of the electromagnetic spectrum. What is significant about this part of the spectrum, however, is that the particular spectrum of radiation emitted by the Sun peaks right in the green wavelengths of visible light (5019.0 Å, according to Wien's Law). Of all the colors of light, yellow seems to us to be the closest in bightness and transparency to white light itself. This is not a coincidence. The Sun is a yellow star.

Newton's Seven Colors
1	red	6500-7600 Å	紅 hóng
2	orange	5900-6500 Å	橙 chéng
3	yellow	5700-5900 Å	黄 huáng
4	green	5100-5700 Å	綠 lǜ
5	blue	4750-5100 Å	蒼 cāng
6	indigo	4450-4750 Å	藍 lán
7	violet	4000-4450 Å	紫 zǐ

After study and some thought, Isaac Newton concluded that the visible spectrum contained seven identifiable colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, as shown in the diagram and the table at left.

This would be a source of confusion for some non-scientists, who gathered this to mean that these were seven "primary" colors based on physical differences. Newton himself, who liked numerology, thought that these seven colors would correspond to the seven days of the week and the seven classical planets and metals.

However, our color perception is an artifact of our perceptual system; and in those terms there are only three primary colors -- because of the three kinds of "cones" in the retina -- out of which, with black and white, all other colors can be made.

For instance, at a restaurant in Princeton, Richard Feynman, when a graduate student, met a painter who was actually confused about how to mix paints. He thought you could mix other paints to get yellow. However, red, yellow, and blue -- or, more strictly speaking, magenta, yellow, and cyan -- are themselves the primary colors for "subtractive" mixing, which means paints take away light, and if you mix all the primaries, you get black. You can't mix paints to get yellow.

I had a student who repaired televisions and was similarly confused about colors. With video, the primaries are a little different -- red, green, and blue -- because putting light together "adds" color, so that mixing all of them produces white light. My student claimed that there were only two primary colors. At the time, I was not ready to show him the hex codes for the primaries ("#ff0000" for red, "#00ff00" for green, and "#0000ff" for blue) -- this was before I was working with HTML codes.

It is noteworthy that the HTML codes for the subtractive primaries all involve maximum numbers for two, not just one, of the addative primaries. Thus, magenta is "#ff00ff", yellow is "#ffff00", and cyan is "#00ffff." It is nice where we see that adding the addative colors results in these subtractive colors.

A more serious confusion we see with the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known for his books introducing "Tarzan of the Apes." However, his first book was science fiction, A Princess of Mars, in 1912. Burroughs was under the impression that the seven Newtonian colors were expressions of seven primary "rays," with a physical basis. He therefore imagined that there could be other "rays," the eighth and the ninth, which would be colors unknown on Earth. He did not explain where these new "rays" would occur on the electromagnic spectrum because, of course, he could not, there were no such "rays," and he had failed to understand that the differentiation of colors is an artifact of our perception, not of physics.

To see colors not otherwise familiar to human perception it would help to have more than three cones in the retina. Many birds and even some humans have four cones. Such humans, with a richer experience of color, sometimes become artists -- like Concetta Antico, who has been confirmed with "tetrachromacy," possessing four cones. So as "science," the science fiction of Burroughs comes up considerably short. Indeed, it seems ridiculous, and the physics of light, at least in respect of the nature of color, was well known in his time. He didn't do his homework -- although better informed science fiction writers can still make serious mistakes [note].

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The Electromagnetic Spectrum, Note;
Science Errors in Science Fiction

For instance, there are errors of science with Robert Heinlein, about the velocity of light, and Arthur C. Clarke, about Darwinian evolution. In one place, Heinlein has a character ask why we can't go faster than the velocity of light. The answer is given that "we don't know" but "we'll see when we get there." So Heinlein missed the simple principle of the "Lorentz Transformations" that mass increases with velocity and that it would become infinite at the velocity of light. A space ship would need infinite energy to accelerate to an infinite mass.

Actually, there is a place this may happen in nature. When something falls into a Black Hole, its velocity increases with nothing to stop it. When it would reach the velocity of light, it passes the "Event Horizon," which conceals the interior of a Black Hole from the outside. This is sometimes said to seal off the area where the laws of nature are violated. The flip side is that nothing can get out of a Black Hole because anything would need to accelerate to the speed of light to achieve escape velocity. Stephen Hawking, however, identified how quantum effects could nevertheless enable Black Holes to slowly evaporate.

Arthur C. Clarke, in his book Childhood's End [1953], imagines that human beings somehow turn into pure energy (which is impossible, thanks to the Pauli Exclusion Principle) and leave the Earth. This is supervised by extraterrestrials, the Overlords. But the Overlords do not make it happen. They simply observe and shepherd the process. This all implies, however, that human beings already contain the genetic "program" to bring about this change. It is certainly not developed through Evolution, since Evolution only operates on random mutations that have already created the attributes that are "selected" by Natural Selection. So Clarke's story neither uses Darwinian Evolution nor acknowledges even its existence in the development of life. This is an odd feature for a science fiction author whose work is presumably informed with an understanding of science.

But that is not unusual. The classic science fiction movie, 2001, A Space Odyssey [1968], also written by Clarke, also ignores and contravenes Darwin. There, instead of the Overlords, human Evolution is driven by the presence of a mysterious monolith, whose presence sparks significant changes in humanity, including, in the end, the transformation into the kind of energy beings seen in Childhood's End -- although it is hard to know what has happened just from watching the movie -- especially when most people watching the movie originally were stoned. You need to read Clarke's companion novel -- and sober helps.

Similarly, the 2014 movie Lucy implies that the human brain contains great potential powers, including telekenesis and transformations similar to 2001. And it must be true, because Morgan Freeman says so. All we need to do is learn to use our brains to their full potential, or have that potential activated by the right drugs. But this means that such potential has evolved in the brain despite never having previously been evident. Again, that is not how Darwinian Evolution works. At the same time, the movie seems to show that perhaps such abilities may have been planted in "Lucy" the Australopithecus by the star, Scarlett Johansson, going back in time and doing it. This replaces Evolution with a time travel paradox, since Johansson's abilities are those she planted in the human genome herself (confusing the fossil "Lucy" with the hypothetical "Eve" human, who is a more recent common ancestor of all living humans). But at least that covers the bases, while the simple idea of unrealized abilities in the brain doesn't.

Failure to understand Darwinian Evolution is also something we see in The Matrix [1999], where Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) asserts that "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops an equilibrium with the surrounding environment." Unfortunately, this also leaves out the essential mechanism of Natural Selection. No animal does anything "instinctively" until this has previously developed by random variation and natural selection. Smith wants to claim that humans are not "mammals" because they do not "instinctively" develop this "equilibrium" but instead loot an environment of natural resources and then move on -- like the aliens in Independence Day [1996] and Oblivion [2013] -- which tells us a lot about the ideology behind those movies.

In the 1970's, this claim was a favorite trope of Environmentalists, that we simply use up natural resources, and that this would return us to virtuous poverty (with most present humans dead), although the process could be delayed with conservation and recycling. They were especially eager and encouraged to see this actually happening with oil, which seemed to be running out at the time of the Arab oil boycott, 1973-1974. Gasoline shortages confirmed it as late at 1979. However, when President Reagan removed price controls in 1981, oil and gas were soon abundant, for more than the next quarter century. There was a similar experience with other resources. Indeed, in 1980 Julian L. Simon (1932-1998) made an actual $10,000 bet with Paul Ehrlich (of The Population Bomb [1968]) that by 1990 a basket of commodities would be cheaper than in 1980. He won the bet.

By the time of the Obama Administration, there was again talk of oil running out, called the phenomenon of "Peak Oil"; but then President Trump again eased regulation, and the United States soon was self-sufficient in oil and became an exporter. The Biden Administration then sought to stop exploration and development, on the principle that, abundant oil or no, it was bad for the climate and needed to be destroyed. Rising prices followed, which President Biden then sought to blame on Vladimir Putin. Pointing out the obvious (and intentional) consequences of Biden's own policy was called "Russian disinformation."

However, Biden, in Tokyo on May 23, 2022, admitted the purposeful nature of his policy, saying that high gas prices were "an incredible transition" that would result in the world being "less reliant on fossil fuels," by which he seemed to mean that somehow things like (unreliable) wind and solar power (relying on toxic metals mined in China, or mined in Africa by children at mines owned by China) would be less expensive if gasoline is more expensive. Although Biden is senile, others who are not seem to think this makes sense.

So The Matrix, using an ignorant or dishonest and malicious narrative from Environmentalism, represents an understanding or application of the principles of Darwinian Evolution no better than Childhood's End or 2001. If humans really were using up natural resources to the point where they disappeared, then natural selection would select against humans. Instead, as usual, it is humans who select against humans. It was not just Edgar Rice Burroughs who didn't do his science homework. But at least Burroughs wasn't mendacious about what he was doing.

While Burroughs has his problem understanding the electromagnetic spectrum, his difficulties do not end there. He supplies imaginative powers to the "eighth" and "ninth" rays, whose character is a tribute to his imagination, and which can be excused as poetic license, but whose forms betray other misunderstandings of science.

The Nine "Rays"
1	red	6500-7600 Å
2	orange	5900-6500 Å
3	yellow	5700-5900 Å
4	green	5100-5700 Å
5	blue	4750-5100 Å
6	indigo	4450-4750 Å
7	violet	4000-4450 Å
8	propulsion	?
9	atmosphere	?

Thus, he calls the "eighth ray" the ray of "propulsion"; and his explanation is that this is what makes light travel. But then, after light travels from the sun and strikes the Earth, some variation of the ray must be responsible for the reflected or radiated light then leaving the Earth. This "leaving" ray is then what is stored in "tanks" that enables Martian airships to rise from the ground and float in the air. Actually, this is the only explanation I have ever seen for anti-gravity effects in science fiction.

Both anti-gravity, and artificial gravity (from Star Trek to Firefly), are generally unexplained; and, indeed, there is little in physics to suggest anti-gravity or artificial gravity effects. Science fiction treatments then tend to presuppose such effects, ignore them, and even forget them. In one episode, "Out of Gas" [episode 8], Firefly even forgets that, without power, the ship's artificial gravity would not be operative. At least that means the crew has one less problem to deal with.

What Edgar Rice Burroughs may not have known is that light does not need anything else to move it. Massless particles, like photons, spontaneously move at the velocity of light. Also, if the "eighth ray" is one form of energy, then Burroughs doesn't explain how the ray carrying light from the sun would differ from the ray carrying light from the Earth. On top of that, the ability of Martians to "store" the eighth ray, or light, in "tanks" poses a serious engineering challenge. Any radiation would be absorbed by the walls of the container holding it. Perhaps he could argue that these tanks are mirrored, so that light, or other rays, would simply bounce back and forth; but I suspect that such an arrangement would involve a loss of energy, while the Martian tanks sound like they hold their "rays" without loss. Sufficiently energetic radiation, of course, would pass through any container.

The "ninth ray" is of particular importance in A Princess of Mars. The atmosphere plant stores this "ray" in tanks, pumps it to locations around the planet, and then releases it into space. Contact with the "ether" generates Martian atmosphere. Of course, physicists for a century had no idea what the ether would be; and by 1905 Albert Einstein had given everyone reasons why the ether either didn't exist or could be ignored without loss.

But it isn't just that Burroughs had not kept up with the physics. "Atmosphere" is not one thing. It is a mixture of gasses, something understood since the 18th century. Burroughs would need to explain how the "ninth ray" meeting the "ether" would generate, not just one gas, but the particular mixture one would find in a particular atmosphere. He makes no attempt, of course, to venture any such explanation. There would be no basis for it, unless Burroughs, as with the eighth ray, has each planet radiate its own characteristic ninth ray, which produces its own suitable mixture of gasses. This would be getting a little complicated, and increasingly arbitrary. It is already complicated, and far-fetched, enough.

Another problem with The Matrix, which I have already addressed in the review, is the idea that humans are "batteries," which can be used to supply power to the Matrix and all the computers controlling the world. This is basically absurd. Animals are little, slow fires, not batteries. Thus, humans and other animals require inputs of energy, which then might as well have gone directly to the Matrix and the computers.

We then must ask where that energy comes form. All we get in The Matrix is that the bodies of humans are recycled to feed the other humans. This is also absurd. It would be a perpetual motion machine, violating basic tenets of physics. If humans are being nourished, there must be an actual independent source of food. But we are told that the Earth has essentially been sterilized. No food growing out there.

Thus, the world of The Matrix is impossible. But this is not the only time we find this problem in science fiction movies. A conspicuous case is in the world of "Judge Dredd," which is displayed in two movies, beginning with Sylvester Stallone's Judge Dredd in 1995, and then Dredd in 2012, with Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby. The former did better than the latter at the box office, but the 2012 movie is now regarded as better, much better, than the 1995 version.

In both movies, however, and in the world mythology of the original comic books, everyone lives in "megacities," outside of which is the scorched earth left by nuclear war. But this then raises the question how people are fed. There seems to be no more agriculture than in The Matrix. Of course, there could be green houses or hydroponics in the "metacities"; but we don't see them. At least we are not told that people are "batteries" or that they are fed recycled corpses -- the great reveal in Soylent Green [1973], which may have the same perpetual motion problem as The Matrix. So in the Judge Dredd movies, we actually don't know where the food comes from.

On the other hand, Amirpour obviously thinks that genuine illegal aliens should be invited in and be happily living off the fat of the land, which Americans in general have never accepted, especially now that the Biden Administration, in defiance of federal immigration law, has opened the border to everyone, millions of them, including criminals, human traffickers, drug dealers, terrorists, etc. Perhaps this is what Amirpour wanted. Certainly, Democrat politics prioritizes aliens over citizens, for reasons they won't honestly admit, apart from what is simply anti-Americanism (by which morally corrupt Americans flatter themselves for their moral "sophistication"), although some now realize, grudgingly, that the policy is a fiscal and human disaster.

Meanwhile, Amirpour does not give us anything like a reasonable picture of the economy of this place or how most people there can survive. It is desert. We see no water. And we see no way that goods, like food, are brought in from outside -- as at the beginning Waterhouse has been pushed through a small locked gate. While we would expect such an area in Texas to share an international border with Mexico, which would be under the control of the exiles, we see no indication of actual traffic across such a border -- despite what is today illegal traffic, of humans and contraband, actually existing under ostensible "control" by the United States Government.

The first people we meet are cannibals, who immediately kidnap Suki Waterhouse and eat an arm and a leg off her. She then spends the rest of the movie in a mutilated state -- calling for the only special effects in the movie (apart from many of the shipping containers that ring "Comfort"). At least this shows us a source of food, for some. The cannibals, like Jason Momoa, look well fed and pumped up. The victims, on the other hand, are not eaten up all at once, which means they require some kind of nourishment themselves, which we don't see.

However, we then find that there are other people who are not cannibals, and who seem to live relatively normal lives in a town called "Comfort." Some sell food for money. Where the food comes from, or how anyone gets money for it, we never see. Waterhouse, who killed one of her cannibal captors and escaped on a stakeboard, with the help of a mysterious "Hermit," now with a prosthesis for her leg, is apparently even living in her own house, without any hint of income or means of support. Giovanni Ribisi's character wanders around muttering and screaming, and we have no idea how he actually survives.

Keanu Reeves, called "the Dream," who runs this place, with a harem of simultaneously pregnant women, enjoys a swimming pool and boasts of having built and run a sewer system. But, again, we don't see where the water comes from, let alone the food, or how any of the lights and machinery of this place are powered. We don't even see where the sewage goes. He manufactures drugs, but we don't see if or how this is done, or exported, if it is, or how things like the shipping containers that surround "Comfort" have been obtained and brought in (although most in the movie are CGI). In Texas, again, we expect the Rio Grande to be nearby; but there is no hint of it.

Thus, Ana Amirpour doesn't seem to have thought much about how the place she has imagined would actually work. She says that her inspiration for the movie was seeing homeless encampments in Los Angeles, a problem that, of course, has grown much, much worse since then, all across the country.

While Amirpour implies that people have been dumped into these encampments by an indifferent government, "liberal" judges, for instance, in California, have prohibited municipalities from clearing away the encampments and their health hazard refuse, which breeds vermin and disease. Otherwise, governments previously would have gotten the drug addicts, crazy people, and criminal inhabitants of these places into some kind of shelter, treatment, or imprisonment -- just what Rudy Giuliani did when he was Mayor of New York City. So they are typically there because this is either their choice, or the inevitable consequence of their addictions and habits -- or the result of the suppression by local governments (especially California, Oregon, New York, etc.) of business, job, and housing creation. In many cities, the recent flood of illegal aliens has been vastly adding to the problem.

An interesting feature of the movie are the filming locations. Amirpour uses sites near the Salton Sea, including Niland and Bombay Beach, but especially "Slab City," where squatters have taken over an abandoned military base (hence the "slabs," the foundations, left from demolished buildings), and living there, largely in trailers, subsisting off welfare or pension payments. The site also figures in the most recent F. Paul Wilson science fiction book, Double Dose [2023], which gives us the real background of the place, unlike the more fictionalized The Bad Batch. Many of the extras in Amirpour's movie are actually from Slab City. Although these sites are close to the Salton Sea, the water is never shown in The Bad Batch -- water that is, in any case, saline, polluted, and unpotable.

Amirpour makes no use of a local attraction, quite close to Slab City, namely "Salvation Mountain," which is a hill that the late Leonard Knight (1931–2014), another squatter, covered with paint and decoration in tribute to Jesus Christ. It has been kept up since his death. Vistors are urged to donate money or paint. F. Paul Wilson tells us all about it, but Ana Amirpour does not feature it at all, despite its bright photogenic appeal. It might have been just the thing to be tended by Jim Carrey's "Hermit" character. But we get harems, not religion.

The full desert settings for the movie are on El Mirage Dry Lake, which is northwest from Victorville, California, rather far from the Salton Sea locations. Nearby is the "Aviation Warehouse" and the small El Mirage airfield. Aviation Warehouse has a junkyard of old aircraft, which houses the community of cannibals in the movie, for some reason called "the Bridge." This is not unlike the nearby Mojave Airliner Storage yard, which has also been featured in movies and Mythbusters (2003-2016), although most of its aircraft can possibly be returned to service. Others, however, we have seen used by Mythbusters, for instance to test the effects of explosive decompression in aircraft -- complete with blowing out windows or sections of the fuselage -- that plane will not be returned to service.

The movie ends on El Mirage Dry Lake, with Jason Momoa, his daughter, and Suki Waterhouse eating the rabbit that the daughter has brought from "Comfort." We have no idea where the rabbit had ultimately come from, and we have never seen Momoa ever previously eat anything but other people. We have seen him personally kill two people, whom he subsequently ate. His personal sidearm is a meat cleaver (as we see above in the movie poster). At least this doesn't rely on perpetual motion -- such as we saw in The Matrix.

Momoa's daughter expresses a preference for the spaghetti that Keanu Reeves has previously fed her, but she is unlikely to have anything like that again for a while. We don't learn if Waterhouse will join the cannibalism club. Since she earlier has murdered Momoa's wife, not even knowing who she was, it seems natural that she takes up with his little family now. She had earlier refused to join Reeves's harem and was then expelled from "Comfort." It is hard, however, to imagine her returning to the scene of her own mutilation and joining in the customs there. So the movie ends with a rather ragged and ambiguous resolution.

Reviews

All the poor science, or economics, of these movies may be a good example how, once one begins generating a fictional form of "science," there will be no end to it. Unfortunately, forms of this, as "junk science," make their way into courtrooms. And deceive judges, juries, and voters. This is how carbon dioxide, a trace gas essential for all life on earth, got labelled a "pollutant" -- inspired by those who want most people to die, or at least live in the dark, eat little, and never travel. This is how "liberals" care for other people.

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Duodecimal Counting

duodecimal fractions
1/1	1.0
1/2	0.6
1/3	0.4
1/4	0.3
1/5	0.2497
1/6	0.2
1/7	0.186A35
1/8	0.16
1/9	0.14
1/A	0.12497
1/B	0.1
1/10	0.1
1/11	0.0B
1/12	0.0A35186
1/13	0.09724
1/14	0.09

The triumph of decimal (d = base 10) counting in the use of the Metric System is now complicated and curiously compromised by the binary (base 2) and hexadecimal (hd = base 16) counting used for computers and computer languages.

duodecimal fractions
0.1	1/10
0.2	2/10	1/6
0.3	3/10	1/4
0.4	4/10	2/6	1/3
0.5	5/10
0.6	6/10	3/6	1/2
0.7	7/10
0.8	8/10	4/6	2/3
0.9	9/10	3/4
0.A	A/10	5/6
0.B	B/10
1.0	10/10	1

However, none of these is really the most convenient system for ordinary calculation. The duodecimal (dd = base 12) system is.

For both binary and hexadecimal systems, the only prime factor is, of course, 2, while for decimal counting the only prime factors are 2 and 5. The prime factors of 12, however, are 2 and 3, which means that the base is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. The base 10 is only evenly divisible by its prime factors.

The practical effect for duodecimal counting is especially to be seen in the fractions, at right and left (where, by analogy with hexadecimal counting, d10 = ddA & d11 = ddB). Common fractions like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3, and 3/4 are all easily expressed as single digit duodecimals, without the repeating decimals [the repeating groups are here shown underlined] that plague the student who simply wants to deal with a third or two-thirds quantities. We get double digit duodecimals for 1/8 and 1/9.

On the other hand, the simple decimals, 1/5 (= d0.2), and d1/10 (= d0.1), do get us repeating duodecimals, as 1/5 (= dd0.2497) and 1/A (= dd0.12497); but it is a good question how much more frequently the student or other calculator needs to express a one-fifth quantity rather than a third or a quarter. The frequency of fifths and tenths that we do have may largely be an artifact of the use of the decimal system itself. It may, indeed, be easier to remember the repeating group for 1/3 in decimal (d0.3) than for 1/5 in duodecimal (dd0.2497), but the same group also works for 1/B (dd0.12497).

the Circle
d	do	ddo
1/1	360	260
3/4	270	1A6
1/2	180	130
1/4	90	76
1/8	45	39
1/10	36	30
1/12	30	26
1/24	15	13
1/30	12	10
1/36	10	A

Powers of Sixty
d	d	dd	sg
600	1	1	1
601	60	50	10
602	3600	2100	100
603	216,000	A500	1000
604	12,960,000	441,000	10,000

The Babylonians, and the Sumerians before them, formulated their counting with a sexagesimal (base 60 = sg) system -- which of course did not occur naturally in the Sumerian or Babylonian languages -- precisely because of the large number of factors by which the base could be divided. Indeed, the only difference between sexagesimal and duodecimal counting is the factor 5 (5 x 12 = 60). Consequently, the duodecimal system is somewhat more suited to the artifacts of Babylonian counting that we still use, like the 12 (= dd10) or 24 hour (= dd20) day, the 60 (= dd50) divisions of the minute or the hour, and the division of the circle into 360 (= dd260) degrees. The corresponding decimal and duodecimal numbers for the circle are shown at left.

Factorials
	d	dd
1!	1	1
2!	2	2
3!	6	6
4!	24	20
5!	120	A0
6!	720	500

"Factorials" multiply together successive integers. Since more integers are multiplied in duodecimal than in decimal counting, we get rounder numbers for factorials in duodecimal than in decimal, as shown at right. Factorial 5 displays the nice touch that each base shows the base for the other system, with 12 (= dd10) in decimal and A (= d10) in duodecimal.

Indeed, it is very unlikely that duodecimal counting will ever replace decimal counting. It would be hell on those who, like me, still have to use their fingers occasionally -- though those with the genetic trait of six fingers on a hand would certainly feel vindicated. It would also be necessary to memorize a larger multiplication table, though I understand that students are no longer even expected to remember the decimal multiplication table -- since some students do this better than others, and this damages their self-esteem and fosters elitism among the better students.

Duodecimal Multiplication
	10	B	A	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
1	10	B	A	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
2	20	1A	18	16	14	12	10	A	8	6	4
3	30	29	26	23	20	19	16	13	10	9
4	40	38	34	30	28	24	20	18	14
5	50	47	42	39	34	2B	26	21
6	60	56	50	46	40	36	30
7	70	65	5A	53	48	41
8	80	74	68	60	54
9	90	83	76	69
A	A0	92	84
B	B0	A1
10	100

This sort of nonsense, of course, is part of the program of the bureaucratic and political elites that control public education to promote their own power and foster the dependency of citizens, who can't even balance their own check books, much less do their own taxes, on government.

A compomise with sexagesimal counting might be a base thirty, whose factors are still 2, 3, and 5. All this loses is one of the 2's from 60, which was not that important anyway. Still, the requirement to have thirty symbols, and not just ten, twelve, or even sixteen (for the hexadecimal), would still be seriously cumbersome. But the number thirty does remind me of another historical counting system, that the Mayans used the base twenty (vigesimal counting). This is unique in the world, and does accompany an unusual interest in mathematics and numbers on the part of the Mayans. It does not, however, confer the sort of advantages that Babylonian counting did. The prime factors of 20 are still only 2 and 5, so Mayan numbers would still have as many repeating decimals as decimal counting. Thirty is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by the three smallest primes.

The use of the base twelve is quite common for various cultural reasons. One concerns calendars, where culture and science overlap because of the coincidence that twelve synodic lunations comes the closest (354.37 days) to the tropical year (365.24219878). When lunar months were abandoned, as in the Egyptian or the Julian calendars, the convention of twelve months was preserved.

Perhaps related to this is the curious institution of the "Twelve Days of Christmas," which counts the days from December 25, Christmas Day, to January 5, the day before Epiphany in the liturgical calendar. An interesting speculation about this come from James George Frazer, author of the classic The Golden Bough [1890, 1900, 1906-1915]. Frazer thought that the twelve days might represent the difference between the lunar year of 12 synodic months and the solar, tropical year. Something of the sort is actually found in the Egyptian calendar, where five intercalary days were regularly added to a 360 day year. However, the Egyptian months, of 30 days each, were not synodic months, and the Egyptian intercalation, of five days, was not the difference between a lunar and a solar year. So it is not clear that a lunar year plus twelve days was ever the practice of any actual calendar; and, indeed, for a common 365 day year, we would need to keep the lunar part to only 353 days. And, as with regular solar calendars, every year would shift the relationship of the months to different phases of the moon. So it is not clear what Frazer's imagined calendar would actually accomplish. But it remains an intriguing idea.

The actual relation between December 25 and January 6 may be more coincidental. The day of Epiphany, January 6, was the day of the original Nativity, and remains there in Armenian churches. The Roman Church, however, moved the Nativity to December 25, which was already celebrated as the Winter Solstice and as the birthday of the State gods Sol Invictus and Mithras. The hope was thus to bump the earlier association out in favor of Christianity. This succeeded, but leaves the twelve day interval between Christmas and Epiphany as no more than accidental.

The following table thus has the liturgical interpretation of the twelve days of Christmas, together with what is now its most common association, from the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas," which details a series of improbable gifts for each day. Edward the Confessor is not necessarily commemorated here in the rest of Europe, and his actual Feast Day is October 13. Although Saint George is now the Patron Saint of England, Edward remains the only King of England who is a Saint. Despite the popularity of the song, I have never heard of anyone providing Christmas gifts for each of the twelve days -- even with the example of the Jewish practice of gifts (emulating Christmas) on each of the eight days of Chanukkâh. Instead, everyone usually goes immediately back to work and strips away Christmas decorations on January 2. A few may celebrate Twelfth Night, the Eve of Epiphany on January 5; but this in itself a little unusual, and generally unheard of among Protestants.

The Twelve Days of Christmas
December 25	Dec 26	Dec 27	Dec 28	Dec 29	Dec 30	Dec 31	January 1	Jan 2	Jan 3	Jan 4	Jan 5
Christmas Day (Sol Invictus, Mithras)	St. Stephen	St. John the Evangelist and Apostle	Feast of the Holy Innocents	St. Thomas Becket	St. Egwin of Worcester	Pope St. Sylvester	The Solemnity of Mary; Circum- cision of Jesus	St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen	Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus	Saint Simon Stylites	St. Edward the Confessor
a Partridge in a Pear Tree	Two Turtle Doves	Three French Hens	Four Calling Birds	Five Gold Rings	Six Geese- a-Laying	Seven Swans-a- Swimm- ing	Eight Maids- a-Milking	Nine Ladies Dancing	Ten Lords-a- Leaping	Eleven Pipers Piping	Twelve Drummers Drumming

Probably unrelated to the Twelve Days of Christmas, and long antedating them, is the simple circumstance that Jesus is considered to have Twelve Apostles. Recently, a sort of one-two punch from feminism and Gnosticism has informally promoted Mary Magdalene to the status of an Apostle, although I don't think any established Churches have officially adopted this as doctrine. In some popular revisionism, Mary is even taken to be the wife of Jesus. Since Judas Iscariot was regarded as no longer being an Apostle after his betrayal of Jesus and suicide, with Matthias supplied to complete the Twelve, we can imagine some Christians adopting the idea that Mary, rather than Matthias, should fill that role. Amid all the men, however, Mary would still look a little out of place, like the single Smurfette (for many years) among the Smurfs.

Other world calendars, of course, preserve a twelve month year, usually, like the Chinese calendar, directly based on synodic months. The Chinese calendar, however, has another set of twelves, namely the Twelve Earthy Branches, which figure in the a sixty year calendar cycle. Although co-equal with the Ten Heavenly Stems, the Earthy Branches with their animal associations are usually the only thing that figures in general public knowledge about the Chinese calendar, for instance that 2014 is the Year of the Horse, . It is not clear that the Twelve Earthy Branches have any relation to naturally occurring twelves, as with the twelve months. It is independent testimony to the popularity of the number, like the twelve inches in the customary foot.

The Reindeer of Santa Claus
Right	Dasher	Prancer	Comet	Donner
Left	Dancer	Vixen	Cupid	Blitzen

I was originally under the impression that Santa Claus had twelve reindeer in the famous poem "The Night Before Christmas" [1823] -- originally "A Visit from St. Nicholas." I must not have been paying very close attention, since there are only eight named reindeer there. If we wanted twelve, extra names could be supplied by L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz [1900], who also wrote a story The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus [1902]. This included ten reindeer:  Flossie, Glossie, Racer, Pacer, Fearless, Peerless, Ready, Steady, Feckless, and Speckless. A name like "Feckless" sounds less than auspicious, but there are plenty there to make up the four needed to get the poem's eight up to twelve. That Baum has ten reindeer is of interest if we ask the question how manageable so large a team of animals would be to draw a sled. Anyone writing in either 1832 or 1900 would probably be equally familiar with large teams of horses in daily life. Twelve might be an unusual and perhaps difficult number. Eight, for instance, is the customary hitch for the Budweiser Clydesdales. With Santa, they are in good company.

A familiar and historically real hitch of no less than twenty draft animals was on the "Twenty Mule Team" wagons that hauled borax from Death Valley between 1883 to 1889 to the railheads at Daggett or Mojave. This actually included 18 mules and two horses, with a couple of men riding the animals for control, along with reins from the wagons themselves. Two wagons carried ten tons of borax, with a third wagon carrying 1200 gallons of water and other supplies. The wagons are said to be "among the largest ever pulled by draft animals." Like the brief life of the Pony Express (1860-1861), this practice left a disproportionate influence in history, perpetuated by "Death Valley Days" radio and televsion shows and the advertising of Borax brand products. Santa Claus, of course, would be hauling even larger loads of toys for Christmas, but then he would have the help of magic to accommodate and secure them.

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