It has been my experience that when a person is seeking answers the answers usually come in the form of what I call a ‘matter based tautology’ and this has been pushing me in the direction of what I call ‘energy states’ as an explanation for phenomenon. Not that I am guiltless myself when it comes to invoking mechanical matter based tautologies, because I do sometimes have atoms crawling around like amoebas, which is very mechanical (although I do think the idea has some merit in that the shifting of the center of gravity and the imbalance in a magnetic field in some hot atom does help to explain the oscillation but it is a poorer explanation for the rising of hot gas atoms).

I thought it might be good to give an example of one of these matter based tautologies just to illustrate what it is about those things that I dislike so very much.

If you were to ask someone why there is no hydrogen to be found on earth, and why it is that hydrogen rises in the gravitational field, they will give you the answer that hydrogen is ‘lighter than air’. Now this a matter based tautology, in that the answer is nothing more than a rephrasing of the original question. My question could be rephrased and put as ‘why is hydrogen lighter than air?’ Therefore this matter based tautology is no answer at all.

If you were to then ask ‘why is hydrogen lighter than air’ you will get back the answer that hydrogen has a very low atomic weight, making it much lighter than air. This leads me to wonder why the atmosphere is not organized like a layer cake. Let’s define air. Air is a whipped confection of gases. Air is not a layer cake. Air consists of a bunch of gases each with a ‘different atomic weight’ which does not prevent some oxygen molecule from hanging out with some nitrogen molecule. Air does not discriminate based upon its ‘atomic weight’. Only hydrogen (and helium, as another example) seem to be real fussy about their ‘atomic weight’ and seem to demand the layer cake approach for some reason.

To make matters worse, a matter based tautology is inconsistent. It has already been established half a millennium ago, by Galileo, that ‘atomic weight’ is irrelevant in a gravitational field, and this point was emphasized by astronauts, who dropped a hammer and a feather on the moon, just to demonstrate that even though some hammer has a higher ‘atomic weight’ than a very light feather, both fall at exactly the same speed. There are some gases which are called ‘the noble gases’ because they do not cause bad reactions, but are instead inert. Perhaps gases such as hydrogen or helium should be called the rebel gases, because even though those two gases know the law and it has been made clear to them that under no circumstances are they to become ‘lighter than air’, nevertheless they rebel and insist on being ‘lighter than air’ and breaking the law of gravitation.

We should be grateful that most gases are law abiding, and that therefore the atmosphere is not arranged like some layer cake, with all the oxygen, being lighter than the rest of the air, being fifty miles up, perhaps a thick layer of carbon dioxide or argon covering the surface of the planet as the bottom of that layer cake. But before we praise most gases for being law abiding we should remember that gases are quite fickle, and on various moons and small planets, suddenly all those gases go into rebellion and decide to become lighter than air, leaving no air behind to be lighter than.