¶ Balloon
Index Entry
Balloon:
“All of you have experienced a child’s balloon and footballs full of air. The idea of a balloon as a pneumatic bag is a very familiar one. . . that it tends to take certain shapes like sausages or spheres. It doesn’t take a flat disc: it wants to become a sphere. If you took two discs of rubber and joined them together at the edge, and filled them with air, if it doesn’t become a lozenge, it becomes a sphere. A sphere contains the most volume and the least surface aand is the most comfortable condition. These energy patterns are always the most comfortable and the most economical conditions. Think about the pneumatic bag then. People have always thought of it as if you put air under pressure and there’s sort of a solid mass of air and you jammed it in, and it’s in a solid bag and can’t get out. The fact is that if you look at a pneumatic bag with a microscope you will find that it is full of holes. It is made of molecules and molecules are fairly remote from one another, and atomically it is full of holes. It is not solid and in fact the components are not even touching each other atomically.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #5, pp. 185-186,9July '62
