2nd September 2024

Carn Enoch on the Preseli Hills

It is humid and misty, I can see neither the sea nor the hills – even the Carn Enoch rocks are hidden. The heather and gorse are in flower, but the colours are muted, the only birds have been a couple of black corvids; crows, or maybe ravens.

I have a short time to pursue my sand ripple investigations before heading to Fishguard for a practice session with a welsh tunes music group I am part of. The amount and variety of music in this area is one of my very favourite features of living here. Wales is known as ‘The Land of Song’ and the acceptance of, and fondness for music seems to be safe and well. Long may it continue.

As I mentioned, sand ripples have always intrigued me. I once had an idea for some pieces of art which would incorporate ripple patterns using embossed paper. The inspiration for this came from a print I own which shows a toad crawling up a sand dune, where the marks left by its passage are embossed into the thick art-paper.  

But despite these artistic inclinations my ponderings usually turn more towards science, or more specifically physics, than art. Of course, even within physics there are nuanced perspectives and motivations. Mine would best be described as lying towards the boundary of physics and philosophy, with maybe a bit of art or poetry thrown in! This, despite the fact that my career in physics has been on the intersection of physics with engineering rather than philosophy, but careers nearly always involve compromise, unless one is one of the lucky few that is.

Let me be the first to admit, this intersection of physics and philosophy can be a dangerous area. People who are drawn to it may be looking for something beyond what may seem to be the sterile reductionism of mainstream physics and I suspect it is easy to look too hard, to see things that aren’t there and to clutch at straws. May every Mulder contain their own Skully!

Of course, the hardest things to examine are ones own unspoken assumptions – for example I just described mainstream science as ‘sterile and deterministic’, I am not the first to suggest this, and it can seem to be just that, but we must proceed carefully. What assumptions underlie this impression? Are they justified? What are the alternatives?

But all in good time. One has to choose an entry point into a topic and I have chosen sand ripples.