I mentioned in my last posting about the fascination with “how things work” that made me a nerd, of sorts. Over the weekend I was visiting with friends and we got to talking about our respective college days and the subjects we studied. That music history background of mine came up again. One of the classes I took was a music analysis survey. That’s where you learn about how musical compositions are put together—the “nuts and bolts” of a symphony, for example. One of the pieces we “disassembled” was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3. We studied its harmonies (the chord structures), the rhythmic structures, the instruments needed, the themes and variations in the melodies, and so on. It was fascinating stuff, although sometimes it could be a little tedious, especially in a piece with many variations on the same theme, or many sequences that run through a set of key changes (such as in some Bach works).
Experiences like that class fed into how I look at the universe and the many “variations on a theme” we see throughout the cosmos. For example, take this image of Saturn, posted today by the Cassini mission folks.
At first glance it reminds me of clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere. And also of clouds in our own planet’s atmosphere. And of atmospheric features that come and go in Neptune’s atmosphere. Although I’ve studied some atmospheric physics, I don’t completely understand all the mechanics behind their formation and evolution. Certainly some of the mechanics are the same from world to world: coriolis effects, atmospheric heating and cooling, hadley cells, adiabatic lapse rates, and so forth. But, at each world, these same processes provide beautiful variations on an atmospheric theme. Who can look at them and NOT wonder how they work?