¶ Snow Mound
Index Entry
Snow Mound:
"In the case of the pneumatic bag … what makes the net take the shape that it does is simply the molecules that happen to hit it. The molecules that are not hitting it have nothing to do with its shape. …
“When you were a little child, the first time you went out in a fairly deep snow, or the first time you were allowed to go out on your own, you tended to make a mound of the snow. It was a fascinating thing because you could push it together and it would take shapes, it had coherence. I am sure that almost every child with mittens on builds himself a mound and then starts chipping and working away at the mound and makes a hole in it and he makes a cave. He finds that he can get in it and what he discovers is that the structural integrity has nothing to do with the snow that used to be at the middle; It has something to do with the circumferential set of action of molecules there that you are accounting for. So we develop a strong intuition about this when we are very young. What I saw that might be possible was that we might hollow out the pneumatic network and we could do away with the molecules that weren’t doing the work, if we had the ones that were doing the work neatly paired.”
