…ULTIMATE…
Stage 67 / Thursday 2 July / From Grajal de Campos to Bercianos del Camino Real / 17 km
I was quite happy yesterday to have done a good part of my stage in the dark, and to arrive quite early at the end of my stage before it got too hot. But I had to wait a long time before the “refugio (hostel)” opened, where I was looking forward to a shower, laundry, and nap (in that order).
When they find the door closed, the pilgrims line up their backpacks near the door of the refuge in the order of their arrival. Then they go for a tour in the village. Or else they sit or lie on the ground in a shady corner to wait. When the person responsible arrives at the opening hour, the one whose backpack is closest to the door registers first. He has the date stamped in his credencial (pilgrim’s passport, which he shows upon arrival in Compostela as proof of his walk), he pays his dues, reserves a mattress on one of the bunk-beds, and hurries toward the shower and the laundry room to wash his sweaty body and clothes.
Today, my planned stage being shorter, I wanted to take my time. I am one of the last to depart, and I soon regret it: the sun is really beating down! I consume an enormous quantity of water. I refill my canteen at the fountains in the villages I pass through. And to truly cool down, I also fill my hat with water and turn it over my head: a cold but invigorating shower! One must know that as soon as the temperature rises above 40°C (104°F), there is a danger for the human body. And there, in the sun on the Meseta, one quickly reaches this limit.
Here I am thinking about ultimate limits of temperatures. The human body internal body temperature is on the average at 37°C (98.6°F). According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the official record of the highest temperature ever observed on the surface of the globe is 56.7°C (134°F), which was registered July 10, 1913 at Greenland Ranch (Death Valley) in California. It is estimated that the temperature at the center of the sun is 15 million degrees C (27 million degrees F). It is also believed that the temperature at the time of the “big bang” was approximately 1032 °C (10 to the power 32 : forget Fahrenheit, didn’t exist then!), therefore 100 times a million millions of millions of millions of degrees Celsius!
If one goes in the opposite direction, the human body begins to take major risks from -25°C (-13°F). The lowest temperature ever measured on the Earth was at Vostok, Antarctica on July 21, 1983: it was – 89.2°C (-128.6°F). The temperature of liquefaction (gas becoming liquid) of nitrogen is –196°C (-320°F) and it becomes solid as an ice cube at –210°C (-346°F).
It has been established that the ultimate lowest temperature is Zero Kelvin: 0° K = – 273,15 °C (−459.67 °F)! This is the temperature at which there is no longer any thermal agitation of molecules. On can approach it, but It takes more and more energy to reach it. This is like trying to approach the speed of light (see stage 61), the closer one gets to the ultimate, the more the hinge on the door resists! In 2013, the physicists at M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were able to descend to less than one “nanokelvin”: 0,5 x 10-9 K (one divided by two thousand millions)!
But even at such minuscule temperatures, as I have already mentioned, the position and speed of particles becomes uncertain: the more one know one, the less one knows the other. Imagine a school of flying fish that you barely have time to see leaping from the water. The following second, they have already disappeared, to such a point that you wonder if you were dreaming! Fleeting and energetic apparitions, like quantum matter, these fish particles are nonetheless capable of interaction, if only by their capacity to remain connected in a school whose localization of each element is more and more uncertain!
To the opposite of this quantum microcosm where all is random and unpredictable, there is the cosmic macrocosm, that of the stars, where all is known, localized and calculable, even very long-term. By calculations of mass, based on the laws of kinetics and gravity, we know how much combustible material remains to be burned in the sun, and one can predict when it will disappear, in 5 billion years!
Thus, depending on which end of the ultimate scale of size one is placed, one can better predict (macrocosm) or state that one can only know less and less well (microcosm)! What a strange universe is ours: the future is partially predictable if one possesses the delusions of grandeur, and partially unpredictable in the random reality of the infinitely small!
This state of ultimate ignorance is in fact reassuring. There is a certain immateriality of matter when one seeks to demonstrate what is really is, as there is a total liberty of spirit to prevent ultimate entrapping any thought processes. Perhaps it is frustrating to state the ultimate limit of our human knowledge, but when all is said and done it’s as if creation were not yet finished and could not be finished, always leaving room for hope in the possible! Would you prefer the shackles of the opposite: an insular and complete knowledge of the world and the hopeless boredom which would result?
