I'd Tell You, Kid, But You Wouldn't Believe Me

Even before he can talk, my little boy has started to hum back the lullabies we sing routinely.  One of his favorites is "Twinkle, twinkle little star. How i wonder what you are."  As comforting as it is to hear a child singing, to lay on your back in the grass and point out tiny diamonds in the sky, a part of me wants to explain.  Because of course we know what that little star is.  Far out in space, immense nuclear furnaces drive the workhorses of the visible universe.  A tiny fraction of the power from one star drives nearly every process on Earth, but ultimately even the stuff we are made of was created in stars, the last stages of giant stars that blasted heavy elements into the vicinity of the proto-Sun in some of the biggest explosions anywhere ever.  How cool is that?  Bizarrely, though we think of stars as nuclear powered, nuclear fusion actually holds the more energetic gravitational collapse in check; the most powerful force in existence barely restrains the weakest.  Even more amazingly, all but one of those stars is so far away that a glowing ball bigger than a million Earths is reduced to a dot.  Most are farther away than that.  You need advanced optics to even see collections of billions of stars spinning around each other.  The scale of the Universe is beyond even the numbers children make up to be ridiculous.  A billion trillion miles barely gets you out of our local cluster of galaxies.  It may be that there is nothing new under the Sun, but there's an awful lot that we haven't explored yet.

"Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions.  Rainbows have nothing to hide.

So we've been told and some choose to believe it.  I know they're wrong wait and see.

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me."

As much as we love Kermit the Frog in this house, he's really flubbed this one.  First, rainbows aren't technically illusions. They are exactly what they appear to be, its just that you're seeing different images from many microscopic objects to form the complete picture.  That's why rainbows are so amazing!  They have nothing to hide because they are themselves a revelation!  They are proof that every beam of sunlight is made up of all the colors you can imagine, but its only when refracted through a cloud of tiny water drops that those colors split out so you can see them.  But it gets better.  Sometimes a color is missing, or sometimes there is more of one color than there ought to be.  The things that add or remove colors here in our backyards are the same things that add or remove colors in the sky or on distant stars and planets.  By splitting the light coming from far-off places into rainbows, we can tell what they're made of, how far away they are and sometimes where they're going.  Closer to home, spectroscopy lets us look into the hearts of molecules and even date fossils.  The dreamers have found the rainbow connection.  They dreamed of knowledge pouring out from every ray of light and then clothed their dreams in metal and glass.  Now they're using it to reach for the stars.

Someday i will explain all this.  I hope my son develops the expertise to find wonder far beyond what his eyes can see.  I hope he learns to fill his mind beyond capacity with the awesomeness of the world around him.  But to every thing there is a season.  Tonight, we're using non-equilibrium dynamics to solve the "kicking a ball without falling over" problem and finding diamonds in the sky.  For tonight, i couldn't ask for more.