Scientific Theory
As a child sitting on the concrete front porch in a green- and white-webbed aluminum lawn chair rocker next to my mother’s father during a summer shower, I pointed at a raindrop dangling from the leaf of a hanging plant and said, “Look, grandpa! The world is upside down! Why does it do that?”
My grandfather stared at the leaf a moment, then adjusted his face into a wry grin, eyes twinkling, and said in a loud, conspiratorial whisper, “Fairies.”
To this day I prefer that explanation to the one I got later — all that horse crap about the refraction of light I heard in physics class. Who refracts the bloody light in the first place? That’s right. Fairies. To hear a Ph.D. tell it, you’d think optics originated with them. Want to know which Ph.D.s really matter? They’re the guys with the expressions of childlike wonder on their faces, the ones who never got past trying to make sense of how the fairies do that stuff.
