A Hacker’s Guide to Bending the Universe
You might have seen a tube in an older TV, but to appreciate it fully is to know w hat’s happening within. The inside of a cathode ray tube is a near vacuum, a close cousin to outer space. The glass holding it together, shaped like a curious chalice, is strong enough to protect both the entire apparatus from imploding, and viewers from being bombarded with too much radiation. Yes, radiation: it employs a small gun that shoots particles at a very high speed, surrounded by a set of coils controlling their direction. On the other side, a precisely machined mesh gets those particles re-aligned — like a shrunken-down game of skee ball — just before they reach their final destination, coated in phosphor.
And then there are the particles themselves. Discovered as “cathode rays,” they were later renamed “electrolions,” and eventually “electrons.” When the tube is on, they travel by the tens of millions any given second, following a complicated pattern that zigzags from top-left to bottom-right, timed perfectly so that the phosphor coating is hit at the right place and time. The kind of phosphor is chosen precisely, too, staying lit for just the right amount of time until it is bombarded again, and again, and again.
But a human face on the other side of the vacuum, and the gun, and the phosphor, will see none of their precise choreography, and might not even be aware of their existence.
