¶ Bubbles in the Wake of a Ship Sequence (1)
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Bubbles in the Wake of a Ship Sequence:
"If the XYZ-90 degree coordinate system were not the one employed by nature, then the awkward roughness of the XYZ’s irrational constants would be understandable. This was made evident to me while I was in the Navy. Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917 I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, ‘That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water-- H2O (not H(pi)O). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern?’
"I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in claculating the ship’s white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making these bubbles in sublimely swift ease!
“Any time one looks carefully at a bubble one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its beautiful sphericity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral–”
