Weekly Musings© - “Snow Down”

Weekly Musings© - “Snow Down”

J. Sweeney
December 20, 2009

It’s about time to slow down. Thank goodness for the snow and nature’s strong suggestion to stay in for a day. Now the list lays waiting but a quick pause to jot down some thoughts before they fade away like so many other recent ones. Here are a few recent musings that may receive longer treatment when the world turns more slowly. For now I’ll make like a molecule and slow down with the cold.

A few weeks ago, no, perhaps a few months now, I was sitting with a friend when I noticed the tree outside of my window at work. It hit me like the proverbial bolt; lightening.

As water molecules rub against one another in the atmosphere they create a static electric charge. The clouds begin to build a voltage differential with negative on the bottom of the clouds and positive on the top. The negative charge at the bottom begins to draw positive charge in the Earth toward it. Eventually the charge jumps up from the Earth and down from the cloud, lightening.

As I sat there looking at the naked tree it occurred to me that a similar albeit slower process was at work. Charge in the form of minerals, water, and nutrients build up in the soil. The Sun reaches out with its radiation and with a simple spark of DNA, the seed, lightening in the form of a tree.

Look at the bare tree outside your window, as it reaches to the sky and imagine yourself aging and moving slowly enough to witness it as a flash in the vast expanse of time. It reaches up into the sky and down into the soil briefly and then with dying falls apart, the pattern collapses.

It’s beautiful to think that a walk in the wood is really a walk through a slow motion lightening storm.

Awesome.

On an entirely different topic I was driving home on Thanksgiving and passing the same shopping center for the fourth time that day when it occurred to me that it might be fun to see only the copper.

Imagine a shopping center but all that you can see is the wiring, transformers, circuits, the internals of cash registers, just the copper in the wires.

Can you see the beautiful structure, the wire frame of the whole building, perhaps even the parking lot full of copper coils from the inside of cars?

Now, imagine an alien race watching Earth for millennia thru a telescope. Imagine that they could only see copper. For millions of years the copper sat sedately below the surface slowly pushed up toward the crust by heavier nickel heading to the core. Then a few thousand years ago copper starting coming together into little clumps barely visible thru that distant telescope. The Aliens see axe heads, spear tips, bowls, cups, and eventually armor, all shaped by unseen life. (Remember they only see the copper).

Suddenly about two hundred years ago copper begins rapidly coming to the surface and then nearly instantly it spins out across the continents. Copper threads connecting points all over the planet. Huge elegant cobwebs of copper threads forming everywhere and giving off heat and light, electro magnetic radiation emits and travels out to the stars. What a spectacle to behold. Lucky aliens.

Just a few thoughts that today’s snow permitted time to transcribe…

Some day soon the research at MIT and IBM currently underway will allow us to project thoughts from one mind to another. Until then, your comments are welcome.

Happy Holidays,
Joe