A Sideways Look at Clouds by Maria Mudd Ruth

Author:Maria Mudd Ruth [Ruth, Maria Mudd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Weather
ISBN: 9781680511192
Google: nKYyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2017-08-18T23:34:52.348928+00:00

Drop It

My husband had been on a long business trip during my crash course in physics. The evening he returned, we sat down in front of the fireplace in our living room with a glass of wine. I wanted to hear about his trip but not before I debriefed him on what I had learned about the cloud droplet. Despite the fact that he had just crossed eight time zones, I was eager to download everything I thought I had learned from Richard Feynman’s books, from the UW grad students, from Craig Bohren.

“So, remember when you told me sunlight bounces off water molecules?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, they don’t bounce,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“They are absorbed and reemitted. We just say they bounce because it’s easier. Photons always interact with electrons inside the atoms.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you can’t predict exactly where the electrons are at any one time or which photons will be refracted and which reflected or in what direction. Look at our glass coffee table here. We can look through the glass and see the rug underneath it. And we can see the reflection of the wine bottle in the glass.”

My husband looked at the table as if seeing it for the first time. He didn’t say anything for a long while. I thought maybe he was falling asleep. It was 3:00 a.m. his body time, after all.

“Interesting. But a glass coffee table is not a cloud droplet,” he said.

“But electrons are moving around randomly and all the time in every atom in the glass and in the clouds and in every atom of everything else too. The clouds and the table are similar in that invisible water vapor is like clear glass, and white cloud droplets are like shattered glass. And also like sugar and salt—as individual particles they are clear, but collectively they are white. The same is true with milk, flour, and snow.”

“Right, but—hmmm.”

There was a long pause. I could tell he thought I was too far down a rabbit hole and that he didn’t want to say so. I gave him an easy out.

“So, how was Nigeria?”

“Fine, but understanding the whiteness of clouds at this level is like studying a symphony by examining the individual hairs on a violin bow.”

Reluctantly I took his point. I needed to emerge from my rabbit hole (as fascinating as I had found it). Tomorrow, I told him, I’d return to the big, bright beautiful masses of visible cloud droplets. But not before doing a quick internet search: “Do individual hairs on the violin bow matter?”

Guess what! Researchers at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna used scanning-electron microscopes to analyze the fibers of violin bows from six different countries. They published their results in 2007 and concluded that the structural properties of the hairs were different but that those differences had a negligible effect on the sound produced when played. What mattered most to the sound? The rosin violinists rub on their bows.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.