I've posted about Blippy before. They're a "Mighty Ohm" brand Geiger-Müller counter which @imhkr got for me a couple of years ago, which she soldered together from a kit. (She's very clever with that sort of thing.) Blippy has taken some damage, like most of my possessions, because I am forgetful and clumsy. I keep meaning to try hooking Blippy up to my computer in order to collect pulses but I haven't. But I have a small collection of mildly radioactive items, like that "Veritas" mantle for a Welsbach-style lantern. The mantle is a network of cotton threads treated with thorium nitrate, so that when the cotton is burned away in a gas flame it leaves behind a delicate spiderwork of thorium oxide, glowing with brilliant white thermoluminescence. Thorium's decay sequence sets Blippy ticking away nicely. Other times, though, I'll simply turn Blippy on and listen, eyes close, meditating on the sound.
What am I hearing? Blippy's Geiger-Müller tube, as you can see, has a rugged metal envelope, sufficient to stop most alpha and beta particles. Therefore most of the ticks I hear are probably due to gamma rays produced from 40K decay and other naturally occurring radioisotopes, distributed everywhere in tiny amounts. (Just think: you're probably breathing in some radon right now!) But there's stray high-energy particles flying around at all times, from sources both terrestrial and "cosmic". Any one of Blippy's ticks just might be from outer space.
Each tick is a tiny explosion of destruction. The high-energy particle, speeding through the walls of the Geiger-Müller tube, collides with a gas molecule inside, causing a cascade of ionization events and a sudden spike in the electrical conductivity of the tube, leading to one of Blippy's blips. Gas molecules are stripped of their electrons, smashed into each other, broken apart, and the resulting electrically-charged fragments get swept towards one of the tube's electrodes. It's a violent process in its way, just as the effects of ionizing radiation on living organisms is violent. The high-energy particles chew up the delicate chemical constituents of the organism, destroying especially the ability of living cells to replicate normally. Listening to Blippy is like a memento mori, a reminder of Death and the ultimate victory of entropy. Meditating on Blippy is like meditating on the Void.
Sometimes, I fancy I hear echoes in return—as if Blippy's blips were like radar pulses bouncing off the unseen depths of the Abyss. Such impressions are most likely to originate from within our own head; at any rate it's quite difficult to imagine how any conceivable external force could somehow modulate the background radiation or some other such wibbly-wobbly thing, in order to impress a signal on Blippy's blipping. In other words, I think it's highly unlikely there's anything to listen to, in the ticking of the Geiger-Müller counter, other than a random physical process.
But I still like listening.
~Χαρά
