earth-mind from dreamstime.com
The mind is a wonderful thing. It invents
everything – even things that can’t be. Or, at least things that the very same
mind can’t make be.
I had a dream, a very strange dream.
Something happened to the earth. A
cataclysm that shook and frightened my sleeping self. And my first clue that
something big had happened was in the sky. The clouds swirled oddly. Into a
sort of disc, white clouds with blue sky all around.
And a man rode a horse off the edge of the
earth. And lived to tell the tale. (This was a dream, after all.) Then somehow
I could see the earth from a distance and it was a series of discs with space
between, stacked several high. Maybe five or six. I don’t know. I didn’t count
them. I was asleep.
None of the discs was the interior of the
earth, just the mantel. Quite pretty, actually – all shades of blue and brown
and green.
Dreams are fine, sufficient within
themselves. But this dream stayed with me as I was waking. And my waking mind
immediately set out to discover how this dream could be real.
How could this possibly work? Gravity? How
thick would each disc have to be to have enough gravity to stay that close
together? To hold the atmosphere? Then there are questions about rotation,
atmospheric circulation, distribution of solar heat to generate weather and
those clouds that so conveniently formed a disc, too. Not to mention having
enough soil to grow grass and trees and horses for men to ride off the edge.
Where are the physicists and cosmologists
when you need them?
There’s the rub. Scientists use their
imaginations to figure out how the universe works, not ways to make it work the
way we imagine.
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