I do believe that books carry everything, by which I mean, they carry our heritage, they carry our ideas, they carry who we are. They are us. This is why I cannot get rid of a book, because it feels like a death, to get rid of a book. I know and realize that these feelings I have verge on the irrational, but I own them (the feelings; the books).
The fluidity of the line, mixed with the effects of kava, plunged me into a state of wonder. The technique reminded me of the classic challenge to draw a complex figure with a single stroke, without lifting one’s pen or going over the same line twice. It also called to mind a “Eulerian graph” in mathematics, which involves a trail that traverses every edge exactly once while starting and ending at the same point.
As I considered these ideas, an intern approached me and whispered, “Where is the mathematics in this drawing, teacher?” Though he could not have known it, that remark would go on to shape the next six years of my life, including my doctoral work on sand drawing. One question particularly inspired me: How were such drawings created?
“I think art is what makes us human,” says Dr. Clara Nellist, a particle physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. “Pure scientific curiosity … I compare it to art.”
It’s this human curiosity, this pursuit of art, that drives Dr. Nellist, who helped develop the pixel detector for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC.) In her everyday work, she doesn’t see a demarcation line between art and science. Trying to understand the world around you, just for the sake of understanding it, is art.
“Where did all this come from? How did it all get started?”
These are the questions that Dr. Nergis Mavalvala asks about the universe. It’s not the meaning-of-life stuff in the traditional sense, but more of how everything around us came to be. These are the questions we all have, but for Dr. Mavalvala, finding the answers is her life’s work. It’s why she became a physicist.
Roland Allen loves notebooks. Why wouldn’t he? He is, after all, a writer. In his new study, delightfully subtitled A History of Thinking on Paper, he declares: “If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.” Paul Valéry was at least as devoted to his notebooks as the symbolist poetry for which he is best known. He awoke early each morning for half a century to write in them, amassing 261 books in total. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”
What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger. When it comes to nature’s toxins, they might even save your life (or at least blunt the sting of its finality). The distinction, as the evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman explores in “Most Delicious Poison,” is all in the dosage.