OCTOBER 5, 2025 – Over supper this evening back home, my wife and I watched some cable TV news. Big mistake. Giving us a bad case of indigestion were Trump’s weekend speech touting a trillion-dollar military budget and Hegseth’s “warrior talk” about using the military against American civilians in blue cities. These reports were chased by Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s jaw-dropping revelations on a podcast about Jeffrey Epstein. Trump can resort to the most egregious distractions to divert attention from his worst nightmare, but the nightmare keeps threatening to blow up in his face. Then came evidence of the president’s unsound mind.
My reaction to the latest White House dumpster fires can be reduced to three words: the 25th Amendment.
But for now I’ll suspend fear and frustration and proceed with an infinitely bigger subject, with which I was preoccupied Saturday evening: the laws of physics.
“The laws of physics” for me is code for what religion calls “God” or its synonym. As I’ve written here recently, the older I grow, the more I react with wonder to the many phenomena that have always been present in my life—the sun, the moon, and the earth, for example, all the products of the “laws of physics.”
After a raucous game of “super” Jenga (Jenga using six-inch-long two-by-three wooden blocks) on our windblown porch, our guests Jim and Bonnie and Beth and I walked out on the dock to admire the gibbous waxing moon climbing to its zenith. The view was magnificent. Everyone strove in earnest to capture the silver beauty of lunar light splashed across sky and inland sea. None of us was pleased enough with the results, however, to want to share a glimpse of them. Such is the case with many scenes of nature—the magic of such beauty that can be experienced only in the moment escapes photographic capture.
We then sat down on dock chairs and let the warm delicious wind blow into our faces. My eyes remained fixed on the moon, and I remarked that despite the high speed sustained by all heavenly objects, from our perspective their movements were barely perceptible.
“In the first place,” I said, “here on the outer edge of the earth we’re moving at just over 1,000 miles an hour. But do we feel any movement at all—besides the wind, which, of course, aside from the Coriolis effect, is caused by weather, not motion? No, we don’t, yet we know we’re moving because the sun “moves.” And since we know the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around, we know the earth is moving—and rather fast. But back to the moon—how fast is it moving over the earth? According to the internet, the moon orbits the earth at the rate of 2,288 miles an hour. This strikes me as an impressive velocity—nearly four times as fast as the fastest airliner in which I’ve ever flown. Yet, while sitting there on the dock and craning my neck, for all practical photographic purposes, anyway, the moon was as still as could be, as if hanging by an invisible rope attached to a star above it.
This simple contrast—the true velocity of movement by earth and moon vs. our perception of no movement—is yet another reminder of our limited capacity to “see” and grasp our place in the cosmos.
Not much can be done about this shortcoming. It simply means we must rely more on math than on our limited sight to “see” and understand the physical world. No matter how we “see” sun, earth and moon, however, doesn’t alter the beauty of . . . the laws of physics as they existed from before time began and will continue to do so, no matter what nonsense our species might toss into the air as we fly through space. In this truth I find reassurance.
I later reviewed the three or four photos I’d taken of the moonlight. The one I liked best was of moonbeams dancing in the water off the side of the dock. By looking down to see the light above, I’d found the moon’s best cut diamonds.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
