Former astrophysicist, unfinished thesis, involuntary weather columnist. Writes from an unnamed Greek island with a pipe, a bronze astrolabe, and a deep mistrust of smartwatches.
View all authorsThere is a number on your phone, somewhere between the weather forecast and the pollen count, that most people ignore entirely. It sits there, modest, unassuming, occasionally accompanied by a small sun icon. The number is the UV Index, and it is, I assure you, more important than whatever Nikolas Faros said about Thursday's cloud cover.
I should say at the outset that predicting the weather has always been a fundamentally absurd enterprise. The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system with more variables than any civilisation has ever been equipped to measure, and yet we have been trying to guess what it will do next for roughly four thousand years. The fact that we now occasionally succeed is less a testament to human genius than to human stubbornness, which may, in fact, be the same thing.
There is a question that children ask and adults forget to. Why do stars twinkle? It is, on its surface, a simple thing. You look up, you see it: a star pulses, shivers, flickers like a candle flame behind old glass. The planet next to it, however, sits there fat and steady, smugly unperturbed. Same sky, same night, same pair of eyes. And yet one trembles while the other does not.
I have spent forty years watching the sun rise over the Aegean, and in that time I have learned precisely two things with absolute certainty. First: the sun does not care about your alarm clock. Second: neither does your body.
There is a fig tree behind my house. It is old, possibly older than me, though I would not care to confirm either number. Every spring, without fail, it produces its first leaves within the same five-day window. Not a calendar date chosen by committee, not a notification pushed to a screen, not a forecast hedged with probability percentages and a corporate disclaimer. The tree simply knows. It reads the soil temperature, the photoperiod, the accumulated warmth of the preceding weeks, and it acts. It has done this, I suspect, since before Nikolas Faros was born, and it will continue long after his teleprompter falls silent.