It's just, like, hey wow!

I dont know if you've ever had one of those moments where you take a look at an idea or have some kind of realisation where you're left going "hey, wow! that's awesome!". I had one of those moments (well I have them all the time) yesterday while out walking and looking around at the world.

The moment that I had involved me and the sun... more specifically marvelling at how the brightness of the sun was "just right" and it got me thinking about all the different factors tied up in making sure that this brightness was just right. Lets start from the big ones and work it all the way down to the small.

The sun itself. For starters it's just the right size, burning at just the right temperature to produce light at just the right brightness of some stupid amounts of ANSI Lumens. The other part to the sun is that it's burning with just the right balance of chemicals to produce just the right colour of light, which works in concert with the temperature to produce the colour temperature that we assosciate with white light.

The next part in this equation is the distance between the sun and the earth. It's just right... any closer and it would be too bright and any further away and we'd be squinting all the time we are outside and have the lights on the whole time we're inside

The earth itself has a major influence on how bright the light is that gets to us. The astronauts on the moon have to wear specially gold plated visors when on the surface due to the fact that there is no atmosphere to protect them from the full force of the sun's radiation. the earth's atmosphere has a major affect in how much light actually gets to us, as well as the colour of what we see.

Environmental influences aside, there are also a myriad of human anatomical and physiological factors that play a part in how bright the light is. The first is the design of the eye and more specifically the size of the pupil. I think the pupil is almost like the hole in the doughnut... probably one of the few cases where nothing has a name, but that aside, the fact that we can adjust the size of the pupil to control how much light reaches the retina is amazing. Also, that it happens without us thinking about it even more amazing. But the pupil has limitations as to how big it can get and also how small, those limitations are finely tuned to the environment within which it operates.

The next part is the design of the retina. The sensory nerves in the eye have a set sensitivity in which light is converted from an analogue signal into the digital signal that the nerves pass (yes God designed the Analogue/Digital before we even thought about it and has been operating in binary before we thought up numbers). How light is converted into digital impulses by the retina is an amazing cascade of chemical reactions that result in a fequency of impulses corresponding to the brightness of the different frequencies of light. The retina is also designed so that there is a membrane of tissue and blood vessels over the top of the sensory nerves which plays a part in how much light reaches the retina. The only place where this membrane doesn't cover the retina is called the Fovea which is the point that the eye focusses the light onto so that we can percieve the detail in the image.

How amazing it is that God took less than six days to get this right. One day, let there be light and there it was, the light called day, the darkness called night. Just right.
Let there be something between the water and the water, and the sky was in place.
Let there be two great lights in the sky, the greater to govern the day, the lesser the night.
Let us make man in our image, so God created man in his own image.
All the way through this, And God saw that it was good. I choose to interperate that as God made sure that all the details were sorted out and just so.

I look at everything in it's place and see that there could be nothing else but a creator who made sure that everything was good. Something else I think about is what it would be like if we even tried to get something like this to work on our own. What a nightmare! If it were up to us, we'd have to spend eternity working it all out before even hoping to implement the beta version of the universe, then once we'd run all the tests and picked up on all the unplanned problems, design beta2, run testing and debugging and so on until we reached something that kinda worked.

God did it in six days. And it all worked. Just like that.

How amazing!