Spiderwebs and Gravity

9/18/05 – 9/24/05

By C. Zaitz


I was sitting in my backyard recently enjoying the cooler breezes of the evening. I had a book in my lap and something the shade of an eggplant in my glass. I had been staring at the corner of my house, lost in thought, when suddenly I noticed a tiny flash of light. I focused my eyes and beheld a spacious, ragged, intricate spider web blowing in the breeze. It had a large hole in it, but it had been carefully and broadly anchored to the corner of the siding. The flash had come from sunlight striking and illuminating it. That is why I hadn’t noticed it before; the sun was just now in the right position to reflect off the east-west oriented web.

I remembered how, when I was younger, I had plowed through an elaborate and sticky web while out walking. I thought about the fact that though the web was meant to catch insects this web had caught me instead. I had to stop and pick it off my legs. It had also caught my imagination, because I went home and wrote a little poem about how the spider web had caught me. But now my house web had also caught the sun. Though the web was ripped, it was able to contain the energy of the sun and “bend” it around the corner of the house so it could reach my eyes. This happens all the time - light from the sun bounces off the air and objects around us and lights up our days. Somehow it seemed magical that the fragile web held the sun and my imagination at the same time.

Earlier that day I had been talking to fifth graders about the sun, moon and earth. I answered their bottomless questions about what would happen if the sun exploded. (It won’t, fifth graders!) I explained that the moon orbits the earth all the while the earth orbits the sun and all three were spinning. Add in the other planets and all their moons, rings, and the flurry of asteroids and comets all spinning and orbiting. The fifth graders agreed that the solar system is an intricate dance of movement and the web holding it in place is gravity. The sun’s gravity keeps planets spinning and orbiting and keeps people from falling off them. In books, a gravity field is drawn like a web, bulging where there is a planet or star. It’s all very elaborate, sturdy, and spacious, just like the spider web glowing in the sunset. It catches all of us in its web physically, and for the moment it takes to read this and think about it, it catches our minds as well.

Venus and Jupiter are lost in the sun’s glow. Mars waits until dark before he arrives from the east. September 22 brings the autumn equinox, the first official day of fall, and one of two days a year when the day and night are both twelve hours long. From now on, the northern axis of the earth will be tilted away from the sun, the days will get shorter, and Michigan will slide into winter with the rest of our hemisphere. It’s time for butterflies and Canada geese to flee. On the up side, longer nights mean more stargazing.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!