Dolly Parton said (We love Dolly...) ` If you want to see a rainbow, you gotta put with the rain.`
Prisms Dolly, are the antithesis to your pretty little idiom. ( Smug.) I have a faceted hanging drop shape in my window. Putting aside the inverted snobbery of it being hippy tatt, I love the tiny oblongs of the spectrum that visit my studio on sunny days. I want hundreds of them in a giant hexagonal glass room, and mirrors on the floor to reflect the purest natural joy of little flying coloured lights surrounding you. Ah, infinite science bliss.
Still reading The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, I have come to the troubled genius A.A. Michelson. Investigating the existance of aether, the stuff between the stars, he and his partner experimented with lights and mirrors to determine the exact speed of light using an invention called the interferometer. Love that word.
The chapter begins with this quote.
`There are no land marks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion, so that we cannot tell where we are. We are as it were on an unruffelled sea, without stars , compass, surroundings, wind or tide, and we cannot tell in which direction we are going. We have no log which we can cast out to take a dead reconning by; we may compute our rate of motion with respect to the neighbouring bodies, but we do not know how these bodies are moving in space.`
James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion ,1920
Science states now, that there is no ether, no empty space or unfilled vacuum. The Space of our universe is filled with the cosmic microwave background at the least. Has that made any difference to anything? Future sailors is a Mighty Boosh lyric
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