We like to frame the world in stories, and we tend to think they should progress logically. Yet the butterfly shows us otherwise. It reveals that, much like our own realities, a story can dissolve into goo in the middle and end up as a completely different animal. And in that, it is also a microcosm for so much of science as a whole. Sometimes we get exactly what we expect. But much of the time, we don’t. Science has a way of ensuring reality intrudes, whether we like it or not, and ultimately that’s a good thing. It helps us evaluate our lives in the context of the world that is, not amid the false worlds we are prone to construct.
In a new preprint paper—which, for context, is not peer reviewed, and is more of an editorial or set of observations than a theory or study—mathematician Kevin Buzzard is grappling with a simple idea from coding that becomes a “thornier concept” when translated into math: what does the equal sign actually mean? And what does it not mean?
To choose to be a parent is a strange thing: It is to choose to become inalienably vulnerable. People say children give you a kind of immortality because you live in the memories of those who love you, or maybe they carry something of you, something of the things that you cared about and loved, in their own practices and actions. But there is another, less comforting, kind of death-transcendence in parenting. When you have a child, you bind your fate, how well things fare for you, with that of another being as infinitely vulnerable as you. This means that when you die, even if all goes well, you die with your own fate still unsettled, up in the air. That, too, is a kind of immortality.
Somehow, neutrinos went from just another random particle to becoming tiny monsters that require multi-billion-dollar facilities to understand. And there’s just enough mystery surrounding them that we feel compelled to build those facilities since neutrinos might just tear apart the entire particle physics community at the seams.
It’s a book that grabs and keeps your attention. Who doesn’t want to hear the end of a story that opens with a baby shower featuring a cake shaped like a big penis? Stuffed with laughs, it’s also filled with sharp insights about celebrity, social media, and what modern success even means.
The contemporary world of botany that Schlanger explores in “The Light Eaters” is still divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But, in the past twenty years, the idea that plants communicate has gained broader acceptance. Research in recent decades has shown garden-variety lima beans protecting themselves by synthesizing and releasing chemicals to summon the predators of the insects that eat them; lab-grown pea shoots navigating mazes and responding to the sound of running water; and a chameleonic vine in the jungles of Chile mimicking the shape and color of nearby plants by a mechanism that’s not yet understood.
Schlanger acknowledges that some of the research yields as many questions as answers. It’s not clear how the vine gathers information about surrounding plants to perform its mimicry, or what exactly that ability says about plants’ ability to sense the world around them. And not all of the research is equally sound—the pea-shoot study, for example, performed in 2016 by the ecologist Monica Gagliano, who has written about communicating with plants while taking ayahuasca, is particularly controversial, and a replication effort was not successful. But an increasing number of scientists has begun to ask the question that animates her book: Are plants intelligent?