World · Physics
When the Sky Can No Longer Hold the Charge
Before a lightning bolt, a cloud spends minutes quietly building a difference so large that the air itself gives way.
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The Whale Knows a World We Cannot Enter
What happens when an animal spends its entire life inside a medium that carries sound, pressure and movement through its body?
Things worth wondering about
- 4×Sound travels about four times faster through seawater than through air.The Same Sound, Two Different Worlds →
- 30,000°CA lightning channel briefly becomes several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.When the Sky Can No Longer Hold the Charge →
- 4 conesMany birds see colour with four types of cone cell. Humans have three.Can Another Animal Experience a Colour We Cannot Imagine? →
- 200 mA couple of hundred metres down, very little sunlight is left in the sea.How Does Sound Create a World Underwater? →
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A question worth sitting with
What does darkness feel like to an animal that does not depend on sight?
For the star-nosed mole, the blind cavefish and the bat, darkness is not an absence. It is simply a world built from something other than light.
Follow the question →“The machinery disappears behind the world it creates.”
Watch
A Wynmind film · 14 minThe Whale Knows a World We Cannot EnterA slow film essay on sound, pressure and the senses of animals that live in the deep.Latest essays
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A short letter with a single thing worth wondering about, and where to go if you want to follow it further.