[Professor]
A Chinese song entitled “The Moon Represents My Heart” is the best I could symbolically use in this reading response because the theory of tide in science is as mysterious as the Chinese’ reverence to the Moon.
The Theory of the Tide is one of the most mysterious occurrences in the world of science. From Kepler’s rationalization that then gravitational force of the moon causes the tides to Laplace’s single set of linear partial differential equations for tidal flow, there is but singular definition that could fit the idea of a tide – the existence of a silver thread attached to the waters and the cosmos, with a striking paradox in Rachel Carson’s The Moving Tides which mentions that the force which sets the motion of the tides is cosmic – outside the earth but acts on all parts of the earth.
In the younger days of the earth, it has been said that the tides were more predictable and easier to align with the moon’s orbit; but since the tides are “not as they are today,” things are now scientifically different. But to anybody who is close to tidal waters Carson says, “knows that the moon, far more than the sun, controls the tides. He has noticed that, just as the moon rises later each day by fifty minutes, on the average, than the day before, so, in most places, the time of high tide is correspondingly later each day.”
Going back to the Chinese song, I shall use it to represent the nature of tides and its relationship to the local topography of a place. The heart can emotionally control a person’s actions, speech, and what-not in certain levels – say, when a person is happy, the way she delivers a simple “Hello!” would be different when she is disappointed or sad. This is also true in the atmospheric tides or the global-scale periodic oscillations of the atmosphere, excited by the gravitational field pull of the Moon, among others. The moon in this case is likened to the heart – the tides are dependent upon the pull of the moon’s gravity in a certain geographic location.
The moon represents my heart clearly indicates my personal take on the theory of tides. As mentioned by Carson, tides have astonishing differences occurring within a very short geographic distance. This may be affected by the large-scale latent heat release due to deep convection in the tropics, or the variation of density in the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth which makes one side of it closer to the Sun, and the other, to the Moon and its gravity, etcetera. The Moon, thus, has the compelling power to either produce spring tides, or neap tides, considering the topography of a certain location.
Tides, as how mysterious they are, are as potent. Comparing it to the ripples and waves, tides are enormous body of movement of the gravity’s echoes – deeper, more powerful, and afflictive that it can deeply stir the waters and produce inverted bells we call whirlpools.
The moon represents my heart, because like the tides, emotions are something more important and serious than just feelings; emotions are not surfaced but are caved deep within. That is how tides are made, from the deepest of the deep, inside, but nonetheless reliant upon the pull of that stroke of silver in the sky.
