There is a brown leaf quivering on a naked branch outside my kitchen window that refused the Fall. In the biting wind it scratches at the sky, shivering with the malice only abandonment can bring.
It’s odd when you think about an object moving with nothing touching it. Of course, I know it is the wind: the invisible force which comes from who knows where and sometimes dances beautifully on heads of Kansas grain and other times rips roofs off Kansas houses. I know that. I’m not an idiot.
Work, in physics, is the energy transferred when an object is moved by an external force. Newton said energy cannot be created, only swept around the universe, from this place to that, losing bits of itself as it goes. Work is being done on the leaf by wind. Energy is being transferred to this leaf. But from where?
Recent higher temperatures in the area have baked the land in Northern Colorado, causing a low pressure system to heave upwards, piling up mashed potatoes over the plains. Cold air slips in underneath to take its place. This tropospheric judo match causes air movement that nudges the leaf that scratches the sky. But this isn’t the beginning. It can’t be.
The clouds are headed east. East, not west. They are going east because the Earth is spinning, faster on the fat part and slower on the poles. Earth’s pirouetting around the Sun makes weather systems coil along the equator, herding warm and cold fronts about the earth like foolish sheep, and their free grazing on the Northern Hemisphere nudges the leaf outside my window.
But this is not the beginning either. As Earth spins it revolves around the exploding gas ball that fuses hydrogens in holy matrimony and releases the energy of their love that heats the earth which spins the clouds that scrapes leaf on sky.
But spinning, exploding, revolving things are not the beginning; they can’t be. Newton said so.
Seven other ballerinas spin for the sun’s pleasure, like a solar harem. The Sun is not it’s own master, however, but only a small-carat diamond sparkling on a star-bedazzled arm of the Milky Way galaxy that is waltzing through the black ballroom of the universe.
Newton said an object at rest will stay at rest unless messed with by an outside force. The galaxy has been acted upon, as have all the galaxies, and they are moving further apart, dancing with themselves. (Even light, nimble though she be, is unable to keep pace with the universe’s widening yawn). Moving from where and to what destiny?
By what cosmic force do these galaxies scatter and spin, do stars explode and hook balls of matter into their orbit, each sphere spinning and whipping up wind, pulling and sucking the billows of earths and causing dry leaves to scratch the sky?
Newton: “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain Who sets the planets in motion.”
What moves this leaf?
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host
Psalm 33:6 (ESV)
God takes exception to Newton. Newton is ok with that. The Word of God spoke to nothing, and the nothing obediently became Something. The Breath of God balloons the universe, pinwheels galaxies around black hole hubs, explodes suns, twists planets, shuffles molecules and causes the mid winter scratching of stubborn leaves.
Thought Butter 