Science Metaphors (cont.): Sublime
By Ann Finkbeiner | September 2, 2010 | 9 Comments
Sublime: you don’t hear it much except as an adjective meaning really, really good, used the way “divine” or “glorious” “wonderful” are used, just another adjective, nothing to do with divinity or glory or wonder. But really, sublime describes something that takes you beyond the ordinary — Glenn Gould plays Bach sublimely – something transcendent, exalted. It’s a lovely word, a word that inspires love.
Apparently the word has always been a metaphor for the process of sublimation. To the old alchemists, sublimation meant refining some common earthly dross into its purest essence. To physicists and chemists today, sublimation means a solid going straight into a gas without passing the state of liquid. This happens with different materials at different pressures and temperatures. So during Mars’s summer, its ice caps sublime. When a comet approaches the sun, its core sublimes. On Earth, when dry ice hits air, it sublimes. Something solid drifts apart into its molecules, into its atoms – no violence, no explosion, just something that was solidly there coming apart into a vapor and rising quietly, transcendently, exaltedly.
Photo credits:
Dry ice in water: Nevit, Wikimedia Creative Commons
Comet: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (APL/JHU), M. Mutchler and Z. Levay
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9 Responses to “Science Metaphors (cont.): Sublime”
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September 5th, 2010 @ 11:10 pm
This is Sublime, too!
September 6th, 2010 @ 11:28 am
Awww, thanks. I liked it myself.
January 27th, 2011 @ 9:17 pm
[...] CHAIR!), Jenny Rohn’s lyrical insider’s look at the life of a scientist, Ann Finkbeiner’s sublime writing on Last Word on Nothing, Bec Crew’s singular take on science news, Kat Arney’s sterling [...]
January 27th, 2011 @ 9:29 pm
[...] look at the life of a scientist, Ann Finkbeiner’s sublime writing on Last Word on Nothing, Bec Crew’s singular take [...]
July 11th, 2011 @ 5:02 am
process of sublimation, the process of transition of a substance from the solid phase to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase is one of a kind process that should really interest people and scientist for a greater study.
July 16th, 2011 @ 12:37 am
I’m wondering how that comet will look like if I saw it in the sky instead of on the photo. It would probably look really nice.
September 25th, 2011 @ 12:32 pm
[...] CHAIR!), Jenny Rohn’s lyrical insider’s look at the life of a scientist, Ann Finkbeiner’s sublime writing on Last Word on Nothing, Bec Crew’s singular take on science news, Kat [...]
October 6th, 2011 @ 6:38 pm
That word that describes the interchanges between two processes can be inspiring sometimes. It shows us that we can go beyond our limit of today if we try. Tomorrow we will have another limit to go over and sometimes we will be back to where we started. Well sometimes we do need to look back to learn.
November 15th, 2011 @ 1:01 am
Conversion between these states is called a phase transition. Water, H2O, is the most common substance that its gas (steam), liquid (water), and solid (ice) phases are … the key phase transitions: Sublimation is the transition process.