Earth turns. That turning has an apparent effect on anything in motion. At the Equator, Earth turns at 1040 mph, but then it has the full circumference of the planet to circle in a day. At higher latitudes, the path of rotation is shorter, so the planet doesn’t turn as fast. If the entire planet turned at the same speed, it would break apart. By analogy, think of a car’s wheel and tire. The wheel has a smaller circumference than the tire, so it doesn’t need to turn as fast as the tire to make a single rotation. If you put chalk marks on a tire at the wheel and at the tread, they would maintain their relative position to each other after a turn. They can do that only because the tire must go faster to keep up with the wheel.
If you could hover over the North Pole, the Equator is the tire tread; 60 degrees north marks the wheel. If something travels from the Equator toward the poles it begins its journey from a position that is already traveling faster than a position at higher latitude, and so it veers toward the direction of turn, making a seemingly curving path to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the south in the Southern Hemisphere. North of the Equator, moving objects veer right; just the opposite on the south side. Weather systems, winds, and ocean currents all reveal this turning called the Coriolis Effect. Don’t believe me? You can see demonstrations of the effect on YouTube. Even as you drive down a straight highway, you compensate for the same unfelt effect; otherwise, your car would, in the Northern Hemisphere, veer to the right.
In math, points have no dimensions, and lines have length but no width. Sure, we put a dot where we want a point. That’s a product of our need to identify something that has no dimension. Strangely, we can use points as the bases of location, and we can use them to define lines.
Make a dimensionless point move. There! You have a line, but it doesn’t have to be straight. It can curve. A curve is the width-less path of a moving point. And in that definition according to George F. Simmons, a straight line is the bare minimum, a simple form of a curve.* Strange! A line is the simplest curve. What’s this world coming to?
Walking the straight-and-narrow philosophical or cultural path isn’t what it seems. No matter what we think, we don’t walk as we think. There’s always a hidden component, something of a dimensionless pull, a philosophical Coriolis. That we maintain our sense of certainty is a seeming miracle. We’re always compensating, either knowingly or unknowingly.
There are some that you know whose resistance to veering builds for years like the strain along a fault zone. Like the two sides of the San Andreas Fault, there will eventually be movement, some release of the strain. The gradual veering of compensation will become an abrupt correction in a path that can have devastating effects. We say, “Her world fell apart.” “His life was off course.”
Acknowledging that our paths need constant correcting is a good start to staying on them. The miracle is that so many of us do make those minor adjustments as we travel a world spinning at different speeds.
*Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell, Fall River Press, 1997.
If you could hover over the North Pole, the Equator is the tire tread; 60 degrees north marks the wheel. If something travels from the Equator toward the poles it begins its journey from a position that is already traveling faster than a position at higher latitude, and so it veers toward the direction of turn, making a seemingly curving path to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the south in the Southern Hemisphere. North of the Equator, moving objects veer right; just the opposite on the south side. Weather systems, winds, and ocean currents all reveal this turning called the Coriolis Effect. Don’t believe me? You can see demonstrations of the effect on YouTube. Even as you drive down a straight highway, you compensate for the same unfelt effect; otherwise, your car would, in the Northern Hemisphere, veer to the right.
In math, points have no dimensions, and lines have length but no width. Sure, we put a dot where we want a point. That’s a product of our need to identify something that has no dimension. Strangely, we can use points as the bases of location, and we can use them to define lines.
Make a dimensionless point move. There! You have a line, but it doesn’t have to be straight. It can curve. A curve is the width-less path of a moving point. And in that definition according to George F. Simmons, a straight line is the bare minimum, a simple form of a curve.* Strange! A line is the simplest curve. What’s this world coming to?
Walking the straight-and-narrow philosophical or cultural path isn’t what it seems. No matter what we think, we don’t walk as we think. There’s always a hidden component, something of a dimensionless pull, a philosophical Coriolis. That we maintain our sense of certainty is a seeming miracle. We’re always compensating, either knowingly or unknowingly.
There are some that you know whose resistance to veering builds for years like the strain along a fault zone. Like the two sides of the San Andreas Fault, there will eventually be movement, some release of the strain. The gradual veering of compensation will become an abrupt correction in a path that can have devastating effects. We say, “Her world fell apart.” “His life was off course.”
Acknowledging that our paths need constant correcting is a good start to staying on them. The miracle is that so many of us do make those minor adjustments as we travel a world spinning at different speeds.
*Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell, Fall River Press, 1997.
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