Friday, July 29, 2011
Blowin' in the Wind
OK, this is sort of a "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" riff, only I came at it backwards.
I was sitting on my writing bench in Oak Square a while ago, watching the branches of a small tree in a light breeze. I thought about what was really happening. The leaves were catching the wind and being twisted by it until the torsion in their stems balanced the wind load, or until something else moved or the wind slowed or speeded up and they spilled their load of air like a luffed sail. Each leaf on the branch was doing the same thing, but with minute differences. Each branch, likewise, and the complex interaction of the whole thing creating this very common but unreplicable movement.
And I thought, having spent a year at MIT: this could be modeled.
And it turns out it could, sort of. At least at the scale of trees. Proving that in a planet of some 6 billion souls, somebody is out there working on pretty much anything you can imagine.
