Skyfaring: a Journey With a Pilot
“A synonym for nothing. “It came out of the blue.” “It vanished into thin air.” Air is so devoid of imaginative weight that Galileo’s discovery of its actual weight shocked the scientific world. Imagine a cube of ordinary sea-level air, a yard on each side. It weighs about 2 pounds—about the same as a liter or quart of water. Or, the next time you are lying on a picnic blanket and you gaze up at the contrail of a passing plane, consider that a round column of air only half an inch across—about t...he diameter of your iris—running from the earth’s surface all the way up to outer space, contains around 2.5 pounds of air. Or that a typical picnic blanket—6 feet by 9 feet, say—has around 50 tons of air resting upon it.To me, the truth that air is as substantive as concrete remains as counterintuitive as any of science’s most inscrutable revelations about particles that exist in two places at once, or the unseen dark matter we are told comprises most of the universe. Little in daily life suggests that the air weighs down upon me as matter-of-factly as water rests on the bottom of an aquarium; that each day I awake and stand up and walk through insensible thickness.MoreLess
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