765.00 Snow Mound

765.01 A child playing in sticky snow may make a big mound of snow and hollow it out with his hands or a shovel to make a cave. The snow is fascinating because you can push it together and it will take on shapes. It has coherence. Almost every child with mittens on has built himself a mound and then started chipping away to make a cave. Looking at the hollowed mound from the outside, he may discover that he has made a rough dome. He might then conclude that whatever makes the structure stand up has to do with the circumferential interactions of the snow crystals and their molecules and the latter’s atoms. He finds that he can get in it and that the structural integrity has nothing to do with the snow that used to be at the middle. So we may develop a strong intuition about this when we are very young: that it is the circumferential set of molecules that are accounting for the structural integrity of the dome.

765.02 The child may then find by experiment that he might hollow out the pneumatic network and put not only one hole, but many holes, in the snowdome shell, and it continues to stand up. It becomes apparent that it would be possible to take a pneumatic balloon, pair the molecules doing the work, and get rid of all the molecules at the center that were not hitting the balloon for it is only the molecules that hit the balloon at high frequency of successive bounce-offs that give the balloon its shape.