This is beyond ironic. I walked right past this exhibit inside the AAAS (American Association for the Advancment of Science) headquarters in DC this afternoon. I didn’t even know it was there! I left AAAS, went directly to the airport, flew back to the West Coast, and checked my blog feeds – where I found this news release. Argh!!
Honestly, my whole week has been bizarre (fairly equal amounts good and bad, so far). Sorry for the lack of posts – things really have gotten away from me, I haven’t slept in a few days, and I’m beyond incoherent. You wouldn’t want to read anything I’d write right now.
In Search of Meaning #5; In Search of Meaning #1
Acrylic Lylie Fisher
Like art, particle physics deals with the invisible. One portrays emotional and spiritual experiences; the other studies unseen matter and energy. Science is the voice of the rational mind, and art is the reverberation of questioning.
-artist Lylie Fisher
These images are from “In Search of Meaning,” a series of eleven paintings based on the 1960’s bubble chamber particle physics experiments at Stanford University. Fisher selected original photographs from the experiments, and painted glistening jewel-toned colors in the negative spaces between the tracks left by charged particles.
I’m very fond of spirals and circles, and I really like this series. I also like this comment by Richard Lander, UC Davis physics professor: “the original photographs were always beautiful to the physicists. . . they’re beautiful in themselves.”
Fisher’s paintings are currently at Stanford’s SLAC (the show opened March 1; I’m not sure how long it will last).
I thought I’d hit my biology vs. religion saturation point some time ago, but today’s NYT Magazine has an eclectic, lengthy article on the biology of belief that is worth reading. The little details in this piece will ring true to any scientist, and Henig’s tone is, refreshingly, more pensive than provocative:
Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.
This internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what used to be called the “God of the gaps†view of religion. The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.
“Sometimes a brain will like the rewards it wants. But other times it just wants them.” – Kent Berridge
I once tried to explain to my physiology students that the desire circuit of the brain differs from the pleasure circuit. Not only did I become tongue-tied trying to differentiate between “liking” and “wanting,” I don’t think they believed me. I can’t blame them, because it’s counterintuitive. Why would you want something you don’t enjoy? But a new Journal of Neuroscience article backs me up: wanting something does not necessarily mean you like it.
In daily life, we don’t consistently differentiate between liking, wanting, enjoying, and desiring. We know subtle differences exist, but we tend to ignore them. When I tried to discuss this topic with college freshmen, I think I was doomed from the start – teenagers not only conflate “want” and “like,” they tend to mix in “need” as well! (I remember a few trendy toys I “wanted” desperately, and swore I “needed,” but hardly used, once I had them. The grass is always greener. . .)
On a more serious note, drug addicts don’t necessarily “like” drugs more than non-addicts – they may even find the drugs less enjoyable, if they’ve built up a tolerance to them. But addicts clearly want drugs much more than non-addicts do. Why? Continue reading →
Anna Journey, a VCU graduate student, recently discovered a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath. That venerable arbiter of literary taste, Jane Magazine, calls it “a gorgeous sonnet about feeling blah”.
If you’ve read AS Byatt’s Possession (or seen its lightweight film adaptation), you know that finding an unpublished text by a significant literary figure is a career-making, or at least publication-making, stroke of luck. Indeed, Journey has an essay forthcoming in Notes on Contemporary Literature about the poem, and she deserves congratulations for not only finding it, but recognizing its significance.
Before I give my opinion about it, here’s the link to read the poem:
“Ennui”
Sylvia Plath Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts
Last fall I visited the newly renovated Smithsonian Museum of American Art. One of my favorite pieces was this sculpture by Nancy Graves. It’s made of steel, but coated and painted to resemble excavated bone.
It’s hard to explain why I singled this piece out – after all, it resembles any old skeleton in any number of natural history museums. But unlike the typical frenzied, kid-thronged dinosaur exhibit, the Graves sculpture was alone, at one end of a completely vacant gallery (except for myself and one of the Smithsonian’s many silent guards). It felt like I was discovering something for the first time. Yet it wasn’t authentic. It was neither “pleistocene” nor a “skeleton.” It had never been alive, and it wasn’t a history of anything, except the artist’s own imagination.
I had a little phone interview today, and as most interviews do, it made me wonder “what the heck have I been doing with my life?” My career trajectory seems plausible – until I have to articulate it. Then I wonder how I got here.
In honor of that strange feeling of 30-something disorientation, here’s a dryly amusing video summarizing life as a series of graphs, arrows, and Venn diagrams. The format’s gotta be just as valid as a resume.
There is a common denominator that links all these artists. It is the profound joy that all feel who observe the natural world with a sustained and devoted intensity.
- Sir David Attenborough
I was tickled to see this charming Telegraph article on a natural illustration exhibition entitled “Amazing, Rare Things” (beginning March 2 at the Queen’s Gallery, Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh). I was even more tickled to realize it was written by Sir David Attenborough. His nature documentary series, like The Living Planet (1984), had a huge impact on me as a child. Even now, if I visualize the concept “ecosystem,” I see not empty savanna, but David Attenborough in the savanna, wearing his genteel exploratory khakis, whispering or shouting depending on what sort of fascinating creature he was stalking.
Even when he was being sandblasted or frozen or heckled by lyrebirds, Attenborough always seemed genuinely delighted to be there. That’s why his words above, about nature artists, ring so true. The late Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, gave me the same impression; it’s tragic that his career was only a fraction of Attenborough’s long tenure. It seems fitting that Terri Irwin introduced this touching, often hilarious 2006 NTA tribute to Attenborough (Part 1; Part 2). It includes some wonderful black and white footage of the naturalist as a young man. I never even realized how much I loved Attenborough, until I watched this.
The Nature Conservancy ran a photography contest until the end of December and just announced the winners last week. The “Best Nature Photo” winner was Joseph Napolitano with this technicolor invertebrate. Wow, biology is cool.
