Cryptonomicon

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That's all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

Now that Randy's back in Whitman for the first time in several years, watching (because it's winter) ice devils zigzagging across the Christmas-empty streets, he is inclined to take a longer view of the matter, which goes a little something like this: these devils, these vortices, are a consequence of hills and valleys that are probably miles and miles upwind. Basically, Randy, who has blown in from out of town, is in a mobile frame of mind, and is seeing things from the wind's frame of reference--not the stationary frame of reference of the little boy who rarely left town. From the wind's frame of reference, it (the wind) is stationary and the hills and valleys are moving things that crumple the horizon and then rush towards it and then interfere with it and go away, leaving the wind to sort out consequences later on down the line. And some of the consequences are dust or ice devils. If there was more stuff in the way, like expansive cities filled with buildings, or forests filled with leaves and branches, then that would be the end of the story; the wind would become completely deranged and cease to exist as a unitary thing, and all of the aerodynamic action would be at the incomprehensible scale of micro-vortices around pine needles and car antennas.

A case in point would be the parking lot of Waterhouse House, which is normally filled with cars and therefore a complete wind-killer. You aren't going to see dust devils at the downwind edge of a full parking lot, just a generalized seepage of dead and decayed wind. But it is Christmas break and there are all of three cars parked in this space, which doubles as football-overflow and hence is about the size of an artillery practice range. The asphalt is dead-monitor-screen grey. A volatile gas of ice swirls across it as freely as a sheen of fuel on warm water, except where it strikes the icy sarcophagi of these three abandoned vehicles, which have evidently been sitting in this otherwise empty lot for a couple of weeks now, since all of the other cars went away on Christmas break. Each car has become the first cause of a system of wakes and standing vortices that extends downstream for hundreds of yards. The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline water is suspended in it all the time, is why: shards of ice that are smaller than snowflakes--probably just individual legs of snowflakes that have been sheared off and borne into the air as the wind snapped and rattled over the crests of Canadian snow-dunes. Once airborne, they stay airborne unless they find themselves ducted into some pocket of dead air: the eye of a vortex or the still boundary layer of a dead car's parking-lot wake. And so over the weeks the vortices and standing waves have become visible, like three-dimensional virtual-reality renderings of themselves.