It's hard to stay philosophical and mathematical when the temperature has been hovering around 100 degrees F., as it has been for the last couple of days. There won't be a respite from the heat till the end of the week, it is said. The air in my area has been declared unbreathable ("Code Red") with an "Excessive Heat Warning" and I can attest to that. I am lucky to hide in my air-conditioned workplace and my air-conditioned home.

The air is so full of haze that the colors of the trees have faded to a shimmering greenish grey, much like the now-faded landscape paintings of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. The effect is called atmospheric perspective, and is much used by artists, including myself, to portray distance when the usual straight lines and converging vistas are not in the picture. Atmospheric perspective runs on the same principle that makes the (clear) sky blue: the scattering of light from atoms of gas and particulates in the atmosphere. As you look through more and more atmosphere, or a thicker atmosphere, colors become bluer, and sunlight becomes redder as more and more light is absorbed. In an atmosphere as thick as the smoggy soup currently over my city, most of the color is bleached out, showing a white sky and blue-grey vegetation. The sun set in a blaze of murky orange, sinking into purple-grey mists.

It is August in the northern hemisphere of our planet, as summer edges toward its precipitous downward fall. A planet orbits a moderate star in the moderate suburbs of our galaxy, all of it circling round and following the expansion of the universe in various directions that some great celestial physics student could compile into a single vector, perhaps. Or if there are more than four dimensions, then someone would have to work really hard to figure out that vector. The planet (Earth, that is,) is inhabited with people who have attained enough technological know-how to establish a global communications network so that people as far away as the East Coast of the USA and as close as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, can share stories and pictures of their fellow creatures. (Check out the July 24 entry there for a familiar picture and link.)

I have no doubt that in other galaxies, other intelligent creatures are experiencing similar things, doing science, cultivating other creatures as pets, making art, and listening to ambient music. We will never know of their existence, but I know (have faith?) that they are out there. And on some other planet, it is a misty, sweltering August, where gases sizzle towards entropy just as they are doing here. And there may be as many other universes as there are galaxies in this one, quintillions of suns and Augusts, mists and creatures. And even farther out….some creative scientists are wondering, as is written in this fantastic article on the COSMIC VARIANCE blog, whether our universe is merely the result of a momentary fluctuation in the entropy of what would otherwise be a mythologically vast homogeneous unity of everythingnothingness. (Parmenides, check your e-mail.)

Fortunately, our weather system is dynamic, always changing, and soon the energy of the same sun that is steaming us will send the bad air away with a blast of storm clouds, and we'll see the atmospheric perspective of blue skies and cooler temperatures.

Posted at 2:41 am | link