No matter the circumstances of a life–whether being lived indoors under quarantine or in that effortlessly privileged expansiveness of our world before it closed—the mind is on. It is relentlessly weaving a slew of meanings, patterns, stories. Some days it feels slow and heavy, overwhelmed by the hyperobjectival complexity of considering a common future, one […]
Science
The Smudgy Fingerprints of our Humanness
“Uprooting the Tree of Life” by Ford Doolittle (From the February 2000 issue of Scientific American.) Science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It’s a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It’s a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like […]
The Emotional Terrain
Watery eyes: a micro climate (Photo: Rose-Lynn Fisher) Maria Popova, curator extraordinaire for Brain Pickings, has identified her all time favorite Moth* story: Life on a Möbius Strip, by Janna Levin. Levin is a brilliant scientist who also happens to be a lyrical writer. Her book, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a […]
In Water
Remaya 2, mixed media on wood panel, 36 x 36″ A year ago I had a conversation with Jerry Beck, good friend and founder of the well known Revolving Museum (in Jerry’s nomenclature, a “nomadic nonprofit cultural organization”). We shared an interest in exploring the linkages between art and science, and we agreed that New […]
Earth & Mars
Dunes and Slopes in Crater Southwest of Xainza Crater, Mars (Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) Ridged Surface Near Nilokeras Scopulus (Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) English sculptor Phyllida Barlow (no relation to me although I would love to claim her as a kinswoman—after all, so talented AND she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin) has captured an […]
Invisible But Felt
From Astronomy Picture of the Day: Milky Way over Erupting Volcano (Photo: Sergio Montúfar) Explanation: The view was worth the trip. Battling high winds, cold temperatures, and low oxygen, the trek to near the top of the volcano Santa Maria in Guatemala — while carrying sensitive camera equipment — was lonely and difficult. Once set […]
Pale Ramon
One of the phases of the moon from Selenographia, world’s first lunar atlas completed by German-Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1647 after years of obsessive observations. Hevelius also created history’s first true moon map. Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard Plate from Thomas Wright’s 1750 treatise ‘An Original Theory,’ depicting Wright’s trailblazing notion that the […]
It’s a Multiverse
Detailed views of some recent paintings that I hope suggest a layered and complex reality *** Science has always wrestled with the idea of an immaterial will, or agency, at work in the universe, and for centuries it was thought to be expressed through the “laws of nature.” God might be dead, but he rules […]
- Aesthetics
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Awesomeness is Good for You
Piero della Francesca (Tuscany 1412? – 1492, Tuscany),The Senigallia Madonna and Child with Two Angels Tempera and oil on wood. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Most of my artist friends can speak about the exhilarating and very personal experience of being deeply moved by a work of […]
- Aesthetics
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Useless Beauty
Who needs a peacock’s tail when you can build this for your lady love? The bower created by a male bowerbird. David Rothenberg is a jazz musician and a professor of philosophy. He has written a number of books, several of them focused on the interface between natural sounds (like the songs of birds and […]