I was struck by something David Palmer said (comment 7) on my recent post on waterfalls:

…there’s something about the waterfalls that really captures for me the change in energy we experience in winter. The actual slowing of molecules. It’s as though by seeing this microcosm we experience something much larger.

Very poetic and all, but beyond that? In any case, it inspired me to think about the water molecules that you could see if you zoomed in with a super-microscope. So I did just that — digitally. The images in the following sequence are waterfall #2 (chosen for its square format) and successive two-fold magnifications of the center of the preceding image (but the actual image display size is reduced by less than that, so they don’t get too small):

6722b-1.jpg

6722b-2.jpg

6722b-3.jpg

6722b-4.jpg

6722b-5.jpg

6722b-6.jpg

Is that not the image of something much larger: a star in the depths of space, a few companions and nebulae nearby? That would fit right in with David’s thinking about the self-similarity of the physical world at different scales, as discussed in his interview.