No Idle Science

No really, the man at the party, the man with the wine, the man with the wine at the party
said
we'd gone far enough to figure that out. We had the statistical models for it so all it took
was
some measurements of the different variables--the size of the snowflake, how recently
it'd been
formed, how high the cloud was from the ground. And also: how fast the cloud was moving
and also:
in which direction, and how close it was to its adjacent clouds. Believe it or not, once we
started collecting
the data, a bunch of other variables popped up and suddenly mattered, ones we couldn't
have dreamed
would matter until we got down into the thick of considering all the relevant factors to be
taken into account
when calculating exactly how quickly a single snowflake will dissolve on asphalt when it lands.
Is it a road
or a driveway, where it lands? When was the last time a set of wheels cut across it? The most
absurd details
suddenly offset our calculations by minutes, not even seconds. Was anyone looking when it
trickled down
from miles up to stop in a wet peck on the blacktop? If so, were they looking from the comfort
of a warm room
or out in an attack shock of zero cold? If from the former, which room? Bedroom? Living room?
Kitchen? Foyer?
Or could it be from the amniotic mobility of a defrosted and idling car? A nod to Einsteinian
space-time
here... Snow that is observed from a warm interior will appear to move faster than if the same
were to be seen
rolling through a spare chill. The observed and observer then not only share a common climate
but are if you
can believe it, far out as it sounds, a unified, clarifying action. The panoramic velocity of
perceived quiet, as if
they were either both standing still and watching or both falling without consciousness of the
ground. We initially
were pretty full of ourselves, you could say. We thought the usual particularities would be enough
of a headstart--
height, weight, velocity, dimensions of the frozen ice, temperature of the air and the flake. Oh man
how wrong
we were. In the end you know what we had to do? We had to walk out there and lay with our backs
to the ground
and watch literally hundreds of thousands of them come down before we realized that kind of thing
was too
common to be predicted. I mean, have you ever seen a single one of them fall, all alone? No, not even
one can't make its
way down without synching up with all these millions of distinct mutations, and each one unstitching
the open bulk
above and around you. There's so much information there, it'd take a system the size of the world
to process it.
Instead of calling it a computer, at this point I guess it would be better to call it god.