snow line

The other day I was looking up at a mountain ridge. There had been heavy rain overnight, but the clouds had cleared. And looking up at the ridge, I could see that the tops of the mountains were covered in fresh snow. What had fallen as rain down in the valley, had been falling as snow higher up, and there was an immaculate snow line, running horizontally along the ridge. It was a very clean demarcation, between the realm of the snow, and that of the rain.

It was beautiful: one of those phenomena that once we've seen it, we can easily explain, with some climate knowledge, some physics, knowing how the temperature varies with altitude, and so on. But it is also one of those phenomena that, until we have seen it, we probably wouldn't have dreamt up. Very occasionally it happens that somebody realises that something must exist – the Higgs boson, or gravitational waves – and then years later we finally see it. But that's almost always not the way things happen. Usually we observe something, something new, and then set about explaining it.

That's all well and good, but in so doing we should remember that there's something quite amazing about these phenomena, that we wouldn't imagine, until we have seen them with our own eyes. This snow line seemed to me to be one of those phenomena. Who would imagine that the same molecule, H₂O, could fall from the sky in two completely different forms. In fact more of course: it can come as ice, it can exist in the air as water vapour. But if we just look at the rain and the snow, it's the same material in one sense, but in a completely different form. For me that's still quite mysterious, magical.

And I'm happy that a part of me still has this childlike wonder, at the world around me, despite the fact that I am well educated and rather experienced in the world by now. Still every day, when I really open my eyes and look around, everything still feels mysterious. And that's a good feeling. For me, with that, comes this feeling of adventure and the unknown. Life is richer for it.

And ultimately, I feel this is a more realistic perspective on the world. Although we have immense stores of knowledge, and there's nothing wrong with that, still ultimately, we don't know anything. It's as if we've built a huge model of the universe. The sum knowledge of the whole of humanity constitutes this model. And that's what we know, we know the model. But the model is not the reality. The model is an approximate reflection of reality. And we shouldn't confuse the two. And this is really what makes me a mystic: that I acknowledge this difference, and that I still like to open my eyes with wonder at the world, and feel the deep mystery in it.