Last week I went to the NIH, where I did research for over 40 years, to retrieve a bunch of my books to bring home. I put them in a duffle bag, which turned out to be very heavy, and dragged the bag down from the ninth floor of building 10, the hospital. I put [...]
This butterfly on display at the botanical gardens of Asheville, N.C. is constructed out of 60,549 Lego pieces. Here’s irony worthy of thought: there’s truth in numbers. Really? Maybe. We consider numbers objective – 8 is 8, not 7 or 9 – an expression of reality, a substitute for making our relative [...]
Like millions of people, I watched the Trump/Clinton presidential debate the other night. I learned very little new, but was happy to see, in my opinion, boorish Trump scrunched in every category, starting from the first sentence when he asked permission to call Clinton Madame Secretary to his last-incoherent rant about trade as an answer [...]
To what extent does the future govern the present in our lives? In an earlier blog (Time: Real and Imagined; January 2, 2016), I raised this question. Let’s say I was guaranteed (impossible, of course) that I would live an extended life, but I was also assured that planet Earth would be destroyed a year [...]
Ask yourself to distinguish between a novelist and a scientist. You will no doubt say that the novelist writes narratives derived from his or her imagination and past experiences. Novelists thrive on subjectivity. The scientist, you may say, probes nature objectively, and keeps an arm’s length away from subjectivity. The writer depends on himself to [...]
In her comprehensive biography, The Invention of Nature (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), Andrea Wulf tells how Alexander Humboldt (1769 -1859) was the first to understand that the natural world “was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’.” Humboldt saw “unity in variety.” He was the first to consider different plants, animals and inanimate nature interdependent and [...]
