“OK, Teena, can you guess why I had you put those different things on different steps?”

“Oh, another game of Which of these things aren’t the same!  I love those!  So we’ve got a marble on one step; a tennis ball, a yo-yo and a ring-toss ring on the second step; and a softball and a ring-in-a-ring on the third step.”

“Don’t forget we’re pretending the softball is hollow with a ping-pong ball floating in its middle.”

“I didn’t forget, Uncle Sy.  Uh… everything’s round, so that can’t be it.  Wait, there’s round-like-a-ball and round-like-a-donut, but we’ve got donut-thingies on two steps. … Oh!  The marble doesn’t have any empty places inside, the tennis ball has one and the softball has two.  Is that it?  But the other things don’t fit.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t fair with you ’cause I didn’t tell you about another rule.  See how yo-yo and donut shapes have a pinch-in-the-middle?  We call that a node and it counts as one empty place.”

“Wait, we forgot about the way-far-away empty place.  That counts for all of them, too, right?”

“Good remembering, that’s absolutely right.  It’s a node, too.”

<dancing about, singing>  “Then I know the answer, I know the answer!  The step number is the number of empty places, um, nodes.  The marble on the first step has one.  The tennis ball and the yo-yo and the ring on the second step have two, and the third-step things have three.  See that, Mommie?”

“Very good, Sweetie.  So what’s that got to do with colors, Sy?”

“Suppose we’re looking at a murmuration —”

“My lovely, lovely new word —”

“Yes, Teena.  Suppose for some reason we’d put a big hunk of bird food up on a tall pole.  Birds would fly to make a tight ball around the top of that pole.  Which of Teena’s toys would it look like?”

“Like that marble.”

“That’s right, no node in the middle.  Now suppose we want to get the birds away from the pole.  What could we do and what would the murmuration look like?”

“Set off a firecracker in the middle.  BOOM and all the birds fly away!”

“If they all fly the same distance, which toy would that look like?”

“The tennis ball!  BOOM and a tennis ball shape!  BOOM!”

“Settle down, Sweetie.  I suppose someone could make noise at the foot of the pole…. That would make a half-dumbbell shape as the birds fly upward.”

“Right on, Sis.  One more possibility — we could send a noisy drone to fly circles above the pole.”

“The birds would make a bigger circle between the drone’s orbit and the ground.  Oh!  Your donut shape.”

“Each way, the murmuration changes to a shape with one additional node and we go up a step.  And when we stop annoying the birds?”

“They fly right back to the food.  Ah, I see where you’re going.  They form that ball shape again and we have fewer nodes.  Now, about the colors…”

“Teena, do you think a murmuration could have half a node?”

“No, that’d be silly.”

“Absolutely right.  There’s no in-between step on the stairway, and there’s no in-between shape in an atom.”

“Wait, you mean that whenever an atom goes from a, say 2-node shape to a 3-node shape, that’s the famous quantum jump?”

“Yup, and the jump-down is, too.  Teena, let’s put all the toys back in your toy box and try an experiment.”

“OK … done!”

“Good job.  Now get up on the second step and jump down to the first one.  Make it a loud jump.”

“Sy!”

“Just this once, Sis, for demonstration purposes.”

“OK, just this once, Teena, and never again!”

“Yay!” <THUMP>

“So what’s that prove?”

“That energy is released when you go down a step or allow a murmuration to fill in an empty space.  Teena’s jump released sound energy.  Atoms release light energy when their charge cloud — ‘scuse me, Teena, quantum murmuration — goes to a shape with fewer nodes.  And the amount of energy for each different node-count change is always the same.”

“I think I see where you’re headed.  Each different jump makes a different color?”

“Sis, you’re as smart as I’ve always said you are.”

~~ Rich Olcott