wild goose chase
Airborne
In this beautiful image, Fiona grants us the perfect summer abstraction, and a friendly lesson in the laws of the Universe. There’s gorgeous blue atmosphere, and there are lovely, breezy clouds. There is clean, clear water, in crisp relief against that sky. Its loopy pattern suggests that it’s been flung upward through some sort of flexible tube, perhaps with a bit of rotation going on. (Hey, this is science, and it must be documented in a serious manner.)
Gravity, in perhaps its most accessible description, works something like this: stuff is attracted to other stuff. The Earth is big. It attracts stuff smaller than itself. So if we’re on the Earth, and we fling stuff up, well, it’s quite likely to return to the Earth — which, for us, means Down.
Given that understanding, we can reasonably predict what’s going to happen next. Gravity will do its work. The water went up, and it will come down. Given my own personal and rigorous experimentation with the physics of hoses, I suspect that the water is cold, cold, cold. If there’s a kid lucky enough to be hovering under these graceful arcs, that kid is going to shriek in delight and scamper away on grubby, grass-stained feet. Before the afternoon sun can dry off the splash, she’ll scamper back and shout “Again!”
And that, friends, illustrates my favorite law of the Universe, which I love even more than gravity: if it’s fun, you must consider doing it again. And yet again.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Jenn Wilson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
