> Yesterday morning I was looking out the window of the passenger's seat of my friend's car. It was raining lightly. As we drove, some of the rain from the windshield rolled over to my window. Once there it rolled towards the back end of the window, but arched down and dropped off the bottom of the window before it got there. This may seem like a trivial every day thing, and it is, but it's still amazing. If you think of all the interactions that need to take place to make that simple demonstration of physics possible, it's overwhelming. The polarity of the water, allowing it to stay in drops and stay on the window... The invisible force of gravity pulling it downwards... The (insert mind bogglingly high number) atoms in each drop of water being held apart from the (insert mind bogglingly high number) atoms of the glass... The 6.0225 × 10^23 atoms in each 22.4 liters of air, pushing against the water atoms, causing them to move backwards... The light refracting through the water, making things I see through them distorted, since the light takes time to be transfered through every atom on the way to my eye... The insane workings of all of those atoms, which are technically about 99.999% empty space... The fact that all of this is made of energy, including myself, and that energy has become a state in which it can appreciate how amazing it is... And millions of other things, all interacting perfectly and invisibly, just so a rain drop can roll across the window of my friend's car.
>
> Wes


And not only that, the window gets wet.
One of my favorite things to watch is the rain on the window of an airplane. Sitting there at the end of the runway, waiting to be cleared for takeoff, I notice that the droplets are moving straight down. Then the plane begins to roll and their path transitions to a slight angle. As we build up speed the angle increases until the droplets are moving horizonally. By the time the plane leaves the ground the droplets are going by so fast you hardly notice them, and of course they vanish after you pass through the clouds and break out into the sunshine. Now why would I be so interested is such a simple thing? It's because it means I'm going somewhere. Ramble, ramble, ramble. I've always been a glued-to-the-window flyer. There is so much going on out there. I can look at cumulus clouds all day. In clear weather the landscape scrolls by changing constantly. I always enjoy the transition from the Great Plains, to the Rockies, to the Great Basin, to the Sierras, to the Pacific Coast. It's a trip I've made maybe 30 times and I never tire of it. If you ever find me asleep on a plane you can bet that it's cruising above stratus clouds in the middle of the night. Even then it's hard to abandon the window.
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