Fog

It was very foggy on my drive home, and I had the strange feeling that I was traveling through something, rather than on or in or to something. It was a moment of clarity in which I was reminded that through is always really the appropriate preposition. I am reminded of this again as I watch the Nova episode, "The Ghost Particle." According to the show, a hundred trillion neutrinos pass through us every second. I have a passing familiarity with the particles, as they were my last physics professor's research subject. They mathematically must have existed, due to the laws of thermodynamics, but they were never seen. Only traces can be seen in shockwaves that occur when neutrinos scatter electrons, either in giant, underground tanks or now in a more natural environment. Either way, to say we're swimming in a giant tank of particles doesn't do justice to the fact that we're swimming through those particles. The universe is very foggy.