Science explicates, poetry implicates.

a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science—
[which I first read without the colon: "wonder stories from the history of science..."]

a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity.

a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad.

Ours is a world rife with minds—

to see ourselves—our inheritance and our interbelonging, our insignificance and our sanctity—with cleansed eyes, lensed with wonder and tenderness.

would that we could wake up to what we were—when we were ocean and before that

before we came to believe humans were so important

Once there were flowers, there was fruit—that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.

Without entropy, the universe would be a vast eternal stillness—a frozen fixity in which never and forever are one. Without entropy, there would be no time—at least not for us, creatures of time.

Energy, the giver of life. Entropy, the taker away. The frayer of every cell that animates our bodies with being.

We are only alive because our Sun is burning out. Without entropy, there would be no us.

The notion of a galaxy—a gravitationally bound swirl of stars and interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter—did not exist as such. The Milky Way—a name coined by Chaucer—was commonly considered an “island universe” of stars, beyond the edge of which lay cold dark nothingness.

Andromeda was not a nebula in our own galaxy but a separate galaxy, out there in the cold dark nothingness. Suddenly, the universe was a garden blooming with galaxies, with ours but a single bloom.

the revolutionary Ultra Deep Field image of the observable universe captured by the Hubble’s corrected optics, revealing what neither Henrietta Leavitt nor Edwin Hubble could have imagined—that there isn’t just one other galaxy besides our own, or just a handful more, but at least 100 billion, each containing at least 100 billion stars.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

Dark matter may be the most urgent gap in our understanding of reality. It may be made of an undiscovered particle, or it may be something much more thrilling than a mere particle—there could exist dark protons and dark electrons visible to each other but invisible to us, fusing into dark atoms in an entire dark chemistry that gives rise to dark life existing all around us, imperceptible to us. And because dark matter comprises 95 percent of the matter in the universe, our visible life—our puny 5 percent—would be the oddity, the aberration, the ghostly alien on the fringe of the dark universe. Dark matter is not a mere gap in our understanding—it is the colossal contour of our ignorance.

what may be the most touching paradox of being human—creatures of matter in a cosmos governed by the dark sublime of endless entropy, longing for the light of immortality, longing to return to the singularity so that everything may begin again.

Emmy Noether developed the famous theorem now bearing her name. Considered one of the most important and beautiful in all of mathematics, it proves that conservation laws rely on symmetry.
[something I still don't grok]

Emmy Noether’s gift to the world—a whole new way of seeing and a whole new vocabulary for naming what we see, which is the fundament of fathoming and sensemaking. What she gave us is not unlike poetry, which gives us a new way of comprehending what is already there but not yet noticed and not yet named.

Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives—a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world.

Chlorophyll—which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood—allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree—the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches—then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air—an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.

As summer recedes into autumn, cooling the air and dimming the light, the alchemy of transmuting light into growth becomes too metabolically costly for deciduous trees.

Meanwhile, the layer of cells by which the stem holds on to the branch is fraying. Leaves begin to let go—a process known as abscission. But as they denude the branches, they reveal the subtle nubs of the new buds that had been forming all summer, readying next spring’s growth. Skeletal and pulmonary, winter trees rise into the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience.

The longest number in nature and possibly the most powerful, π factors into our understanding of fractals and eclipses, of cosmology and thermodynamics, yet it remains ever elusive in its totality.

An irrational number—a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, the ratio between two whole numbers—π unmoors our basic intuitions about reality with its disquieting whisper of an infinity beyond the grasp of reason.

as transient creatures suspended in space between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, suspended in time between not yet and no more, we simply cannot conceive of infinity.

ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm, as well as heaven and earth shall pass away, but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing, it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five, its uncommonly fine eight, its far from final seven, nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity to continue.

chemistry conceived of atomic theory in the late nineteenth century and gave birth to particle physics in the early twentieth. Then substances suddenly came undone to reveal smaller fundamental units of matter, which too were called elements, and there were dozens of them, then a hundred, then more, endlessly combinable and recombinable into everything we can see, smell, touch, taste, and turn into a wedding band or a bomb.

Suddenly, matter was mutable and its organizing principle was not that of substances, nor of elements, but of the real fundamental units—protons and electrons, endlessly configurable, capable of what the alchemists had failed at: transmuting one element into another, simply by shedding a particle.

To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live.

The octopus branched from our shared vertebrate lineage some 550 million years ago to evolve into one of this planet’s most alien intelligences, endowed with an astonishing distributed nervous system and capable of recognizing others, of forming social bonds, of navigating mazes. It is the Descartes of the oceans, learning how to live in its environment by trial and error—that is, by basic empiricism.

her body-shaped mind and her eight-arm embrace of alien realities, with her colorblind vision sightful of polarized light, and her perpetually awestruck lidless eye—can see shades of blue we cannot conceive.

up here, we swim amid particles we cannot perceive folded into dimensions we cannot imagine to tell stories about what is real and what is possible, and what it means to be.

Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe

With our scurrying minds and our lidless will and our lank, floppy bodies and our galloping yens and our deep, cosmic loneliness and our starboard hearts where love careens, we are listening, the small bipeds with the giant dreams.