Zen Koan

January 10, 2025
By Aathreya Kadambi

https://wyattroy.github.io/mu-mirror/

I thought it was interesting how he was discussing this philosophy of “boundaries”, like what really separates us from a banana? Is a banana still a banana as it is eaten? Are you still just you as a banana enters your digestive system? These questions seem pedantic, but I think they’re interesting. In particular, recently, I’ve been thinking about a similar question: what prevents clouds from coalescing very quickly? Why do they spend so much time floating around before suddenly plumetting? Is the elevation of a cloud typically something that always decreases throughout the lifetime of a cloud? Especially after learning about the Cahn-Hilliard equation, this fact that clouds don’t coalesce has been very strange and interesting to me.