sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

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sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

Roger Critchlow-2
Always waking up with hackernews:


Possible Link between the Distribution of Atomic Spectral Lines and the Radiation–Matter‐Equilibrium in the Early Universe


image.png

As the authors say, quoting Asimov, that's funny.
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Re: sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

jon zingale
Roger,

I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
Could you say more about this result?

Jon

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Re: sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

Roger Critchlow-2
Jon --

It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the link is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no reason to expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at all?  It's just a weird result.

-- rec --

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
Roger,

I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
Could you say more about this result?

Jon
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Re: sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

Frank Wimberly-2
When I worked at the PIttsburgh Supercomputing Center, a division of CMU, we had a user who produced a visualization of the first few milliseconds after the big bang.  How can they do that?

Didn't Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for showing that the background radiation caused by that event is what radio telescopes hear/see that they can't otherwise account for?

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 3:59 PM Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
Jon --

It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the link is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no reason to expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at all?  It's just a weird result.

-- rec --

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
Roger,

I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
Could you say more about this result?

Jon
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Re: sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

David Eric Smith
Frank, 

On May 13, 2020, at 7:31 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

When I worked at the PIttsburgh Supercomputing Center, a division of CMU, we had a user who produced a visualization of the first few milliseconds after the big bang.  How can they do that?

Didn't Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for showing that the background radiation caused by that event is what radio telescopes hear/see that they can't otherwise account for?

Yes, this is correct.  There is a big time difference, though.  The microwave radiation we see as the CMB is the last image of a matter-radiation equilibrium just before a plasma of free electrons and nuclei (which couples actively and continuously to the radiation field in which it is embedded, and is thus “opaque") condensed into the first neutral atoms, which are mostly transparent to that radiation.  The event is called “recombination”, even though there had been no combination before that, and it is reconstructed to have happened at about 370k years after the Big Bang.  The non-uniformity of the CMB reflects fluctuations in the density of matter and radiation, which probably were mainly maintained through the inertia of matter, since just electromagnetic radiation would have smoothed faster.  (Although, exactly how much of this was imposed at distances larger than the causal horizon at that time, by inflationary initial conditions, is not something I know off the top of my head.).  All that to say, the CMB as we see it today is the image of what was even, at the time, a relatively low-energy transition, on the order of ten thousand degrees.

A 1ms simulation requires going through several much earlier transitions, but they are all still within physics that we can characterize in accelerators.  The number I find on google is 10^12K, which is around 10^8eV, so less than 1GeV, which is the characteristic energy scale for condensation of nucleons from strong interactions, and a factor of nearly 10^5 lower than the highest energies now characterized at the Large Hadron Collider.  That simulation could have been done within Enrico Fermi’s very earliest-generation representation for the interaction of pi mesons with nucleons, before even tackling the hard problems of predicting nucleon masses correctly from QCD, which dragged on for a few more decades.

A thing that is so strange is that, although these were very indirect to discover and technically difficult to reach, and hard to simulate well, they are still “simple” phenomena, in the sense of having few new organizational motifs required to be understood.  So a simulation of them is less of a problem in principle than a simulation of how the changes in a regulatory law should be expected to change the long-range possibilities for the trajectory of an economy.  

It’s all very strange, how these things fit together.

Eric





On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 3:59 PM Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
Jon --

It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the link is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no reason to expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at all?  It's just a weird result.

-- rec --

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
Roger,

I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
Could you say more about this result?

Jon
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--
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Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Re: sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

Russell Standish-2
In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
I suspect the shape of the curve is due to adding up a whole bunch of
unrelated things with some lower wavelength boundary, just like the
"law of large numbers" theorem, that shows adding up random numbers
gives a normal distribution (bell-shaped curve). The same might be
said of the black body curve (although it has been ages since I've
looked at the mathematics of that).

The peak of the curve at 9000K is probably a coinicidence, although
IIUC, the universe was constantly cooling from the first spit second,
so is the point at which it was 9000K significant in any way?

Anyway - meh - someone else can look into this.

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 05:59:11PM -0400, Roger Critchlow wrote:

> Jon --
>
> It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of
> spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the link is
> between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no reason to
> expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at all?  It's just a
> weird result.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>     Roger,
>
>     I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
>     and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
>     Could you say more about this result?
>
>     Jon
>     .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
>     .... . ...
>     FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>

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