Sphere Delight

My wife’s sister and her husband just wrapped up a visit here in South Carolina. On the drive down from Colorado they made several sightseeing detours, but the trip back was pedal-to-the-metal… with the exception of one stop: the Moon Marble Company in Bonner Springs, Kansas. Moon Marbles stocks beautiful handmade wooden games and toys but c’mon, who braves the barren wastelands of Kansas for those? Marbles on the other hand, would draw me in like a bee to nectar.

A marble is the perfect example of a sphere, isn’t it?  I love spheres (including the word itself; much more elegant than “ball” or “orb”).  Take a semicircle, revolve it a full loop around its diameter and voila! – a sphere.  Calculating the volume of a sphere involves cubing its radius but let’s stop right there with the math lesson.  Cubes and spheres just don’t belong in the same conversation.

Lemons can be oblate spheroids

Most of you readers are tuned in from the Northern Hemisphere, the half of our planet above the Equator.  I find it cool to think of Earth as a sphere (with “big blue marble” a close second).  It’s the biggest sphere we humans know (or have you been to Jupiter?)  At your next party, wow your friends by telling them Earth is actually an oblate spheroid: flattened at both poles and bulging at the Equator.  Ewwwww.  Not a very pretty sphere, now is it?

Here’s the paragraph where I cop out and simply list a bunch of spheres, like oranges, Christmas ornaments, eyeballs, pearls, and the moon, but that’s just so three-hundred-blog-posts ago.  Spheres can be much cooler.  For instance, picture an atom (I’ll pause for those who need a microscope).  An atom is a spherical cluster of neutrons and protons (which are also spheres) encircled by whizzing electrons (more spheres).  Did you know your body is made up of over 7 octillion atoms?  That’s a lot of spheres.  You might want to lose a little weight.

Glinda traveled to Oz in a sphere (photo courtesy of MGM)

Soap bubbles are spheres.  Sure, you aim to create those giant wibbly-wobbly monsters but for the most part you generate a cloud of perfectly spherical transparent globes, born on a whisper of air and extinguished seconds later.  I’m guessing soap bubbles have the shortest lifespans of all spheres.

When a college buddy visited several years ago, he brought a paperweight made by an artist near his hometown in New Jersey.  It’s a glass sphere with just the slightest bit of the bottom lopped off so it doesn’t roll off my desk.  I’ve picked up a lot of tchochkes over the years but I’m not letting this one go.  Did I mention spheres are cool?

Three years before he wrote Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton authored a novel called Sphere.  It’s about a group of scientists exploring a giant spacecraft sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.  In the spacecraft’s cargo hold: a mysterious sphere, determined to be extraterrestrial and literally mind-blowing.  Mark my words; spheres can be as terrifying as dinosaurs.  Read it.

Dimples can be cute.  Not this one.

Star Wars focused on a giant spherical colony – the Empire’s “Death Star” – but the air went out of my perfectly round balloon as soon as I saw the giant divot on its side, not to mention all those channels and openings pierced by the X-wing starfighters.  In other words, the Death Star was a decidedly less-than-perfect orb.  So I applauded alongside everybody else when Luke Skywalker blew this sphere to kingdom come.

Here’s a place you wouldn’t expect to find a sphere: a Christian hymn.  In the first verse of This Is My Father’s World we have, “All nature sings and round me rings, the music of the spheres”.  The plural throws me off, because more than one sphere suggests more than just Earth (the entire solar system?)  Or maybe we aren’t singing about the planets at all.  A quote from August Rush seems relevant; the final line in the movie: “The music is all around us… all you have to do, is listen.”

Coming soon to Sin City

We’re starting to go round and round here (heh) so let’s conclude with the world’s largest sphere.  The Guinness Book writers will deem it so once the “MSG Sphere” opens in Las Vegas in a few months.  At 300 feet tall and 500 feet wide, the Sphere will dramatically change a skyline that’s already pretty dramatic, especially with 1.2 million LEDs on its surface generating all sorts of images and animation.  For concerts, sports, and the like, the Sphere can seat up to 18,000 spectators.  I plan to be one of them…  just as soon as I make it to Moon Marbles in Kansas.

Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “This futuristic entertainment venue is the world’s largest spherical structure”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

29 thoughts on “Sphere Delight”

  2. “Dimples can be cute. Not this one.” Haha. Sphere IS a fun word, now that you mention it. Bubbles are so perfect, and they’re pretty. Oblate spheroid–Yep. I’ll definitely drop that factoid if I want to annoy my friends. 😉

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    1. It was strange to include hemi-sphere (or even atmo-sphere) in this post because without Earth itself neither one exists. I’ve always though of a hemisphere as just an ambiguous space half the world lives in, not half a sphere.

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    1. Crud, the earth IS flat! What was I thinking? Send this post to the discard pile… 😉

      Colorado to SC is at least twenty-four hours of driving. No thanks. My sister-in-law and her husband are nuts for doing it (both ways!) They haven’t flown anywhere in years.

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  4. I admire your love of marbles. Not everyone is secure enough to say that. I like the idea of a spherical building, but in reality having been in a couple, I prefer seeing them from outside rather than being inside one. I do like straight lines, I guess.

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    1. As long as I have my marbles (that is, I haven’t lost them) all is well. And yes, a spherical structure has to be the most inefficient use of space out there. That Las Vegas venue’s going to be 80% “air”. Like you, I’ll stick with spaces with horizontal and vertical surfaces. And ninety-degree angles, now that I think about it.

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  7. From my experience, Kansas hasn’t changed at all since 1969. Maybe I’ll run into Glinda on the way to Moon Marbles.

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  8. Dare I say ‘The only thing flat earthers fear is sphere itself…’
    I have one of those glass spheres – I like looking through it because everything is upside down.

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  9. Well that huge sphere will certainly change the landscape for Sin City won’t it Dave? I think of Las Vegas as the Strip with its marquis and city lights. I have never been there as a adult – I think we passed through or near it when I was a kid. I remember when Ontario Place in Toronto was built. The next time we visited my grandmother, I went to the waterfront to see it. Its iconic bubble changed the view. I had to Google to find its formal name which was not just the Bubble, but the Ontario Place Cinesphere.

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    1. They keep putting new things in Las Vegas and I keep not going 🙂

      I hadn’t heard of the Cinesphere (but I love the name). It’s more like a geodesic dome with its structural triangular elements. That’s what’s impresses me about the Sphere in Las Vegas – no triangles, and the exterior look of a perfectly smooth ball. I’d love to know how it was constructed.

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      1. We’ll just skip the bright city lights of Las Vegas, kind of like that movie “Electric Horsemen” with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda – off to nature. Ontario Place was quite the tourist attraction on the waterfront when it opened. A lot of planning went into making the Las Vegas Sphere and I’ll bet they won’t divulge how they did it!

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  11. Don’t forget Spaceship Earth at Epcot, Disney World! The sphere stands 180 feet tall and is made from more than 11,000 triangles. (I did NOT remember that from our visits there–I had to look it up.) Now the sphere in Vegas will be even bigger!

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    1. Oh right, now that’s a VERY big sphere, Nancy. I haven’t been to Epcot in years but you’ve given me an excuse to go back. Much more family-friendly than Las Vegas 🙂

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  14. Sphere is such a seldom used synonym for ball, and should be used more. This could change the world of sports. Think basesphere, footsphere and basketsphere. It’s also odd how spear sounds almost exactly like Sphere, yet the two things could scarcely be more different.

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    1. Your words make me think these sports could be modified to be played IN spheres, at least as soon as we figure out the whole flying spacesuit thing. With basesphere for instance, the batter would be hovering at the center with the fielders hovering in all directions. No foul balls!

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