Thermodynamics is Grand

On the leg back to Memphis, I saw another fascinating demonstration of physics. We took off from a gray day, overcast and cold and climbed through the clouds and burst into sunshine. From above, the clouds looked like a shining desert of downy dunes stretching to the horizon. While the sight was incredible, it wasn’t unique in my experience. However, what I’d never seen before was the edge. Somewhere over the [seemed too late to be the Tennessee and too early to be the Mississippi] River, the clouds suddenly stopped; a long, crisp edge that reminded me of quiet surf lapping at the beach, leaving a line of foam as the waves recede. Thermodynamics is grand.

 

The Earth is Round

I witnessed a beautiful physics lesson this morning. The first leg of my annual sojourn north started before dawn but as the A360 climbed from the runway, the horizon began to appear out the window from my seat over the starboard wing. Armed with a 1018 random song playlist and Shure headphones to silence the engine a dozen feet away, I watched the sky gradually lighten from a thin line of pink to a colorful band that covered the spectrum, not a clearly banded summer curve but a blend that showed every possible combination of color bounded above and below by the blacks of the horizon and the night sky. At first, I thought the sky was completely cloudless until the realization came that the hills on the Florida horizon I was having trouble identifying were the tops of clouds far to the east, their bottoms hidden by the curve of distance. What took minutes on the ground stretched into an hour as the plane raced west on its path north to Memphis, like a slow motion movie with a cool soundtrack. The earth is round.