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In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women, botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art, most famously in Beatrix Potter's scientific drawings of mushrooms and Margaret Gatty's stunning illustrated classification of seaweed. Across the Atlantic, this art-science adventure in botany found an improbable yet impassioned practitioner in one of humanity's most beloved and influential poets: Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886).

Long before she began writing poems, Dickinson undertook a rather different yet unexpectedly parallel art of contemplation and composition - the gathering, growing, classification, and pressing of flowers, which she saw as manifestations of the Muse not that dissimilar to poems. (More than a century later, Robert Penn Warren would articulate that common ground in his observation that "poetry, like science, draws not only those who make it but also those who understand and appreciate it.")

Dickinson started studying botany at the age of nine and assisting her mother at the garden at twelve, but it wasn't until she began attending Mount Holyoke in her late teens - around the time the only authenticated daguerrotype of her was taken - that she began approaching her botanical zeal with scientific rigor.

Mary Lyon, the school's founder and first principal, was an ardent botanist herself, trained by the famous educator and horticulturalist Dr. Edward Hitchcock. Although Lyon encouraged all her girls to collect, study, and preserve local flowers in herbaria, Dickinson's herbarium - with which I first became enchanted at the Morgan Library's fantastic Emily Dickinson exhibition - was a masterpiece of uncommon punctiliousness and poetic beauty: 424 flowers from the Amherst region, which Dickinson celebrated as "beautiful children of spring," arranged with a remarkable sensitivity to scale and visual cadence across sixty-six pages in a large leather-bound album. Slim paper labels punctuate the specimens like enormous dashes inscribed with the names of the plants - sometimes colloquial, sometimes Linnaean - in Dickinson's elegant handwriting.

What emerges is an elegy for time, composed with passionate patience, emanating the same wakefulness to sensuality and mortality that marks Dickinson's poetry.

Although the original herbarium survives in the Emily Dickinson Room at Harvard's Houghton Rare Book Library, it is so fragile that even scholars are prohibited from examining it and the out-of-print facsimile book is so prohibitively expensive that this miraculous masterpiece at the intersection of poetry and science has practically vanished from the popular imagination. But in a heartening testament to the digital humanities as a force of cultural stewardship, Harvard has digitized Dickinson's herbarium in its totality.

Judith Farr discusses the herbarium in her altogether wonderful book The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (public library), in which she writes:

The photo facsimiles of the herbarium now available to readers at the Houghton Library still present the girl Emily appealingly: the one who misspelled, who arranged pressed flowers in artistic form, who with Wordsworthian tenderness considered nature her friend.

One of the most aesthetically dramatic pages in the herbarium features eight different kinds of violet, a flower Dickinson cherished above others for the "unsuspected" splendor with which it ambushed the meadow-wanderer.

An especially peculiar feature of Dickinson's herbarium is her choice for the opening page: tropical jasmine - not a plant native to the traditional flora of her time and place, but one native, perhaps, to the wilderness of her imagination - the selfsame imagination from which her tradition-breaking verses and forbidden loves blossomed.

Farr considers the significance of the jasmine:

On the very first page, the first flower pressed by the girl Emily, was the Jasminum or jasmine, the tropical flower that would come to mean passion to her as a woman. This "belle of Amherst," as she once imagined herself, this poet who liked to think that she saw "New Englandly," was, though Puritan in her disciplined upbringing, profoundly attracted to the foreign and especially to the semitropical or tropical climes that she read about in Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly-Santo Domingo, Brazil, Potosi, Zanzibar, Italy... Domesticating the jasmine in the cold climate of New England, writing sensuous lyrics about forbidden love in spare meters, Dickinson followed a paradoxical pattern that related poet to gardener in one adventurous pursuit. Just as her fondness for buttercups, clover, anemones, and gentians spoke of an attraction to the simple and commonplace, her taste for strange exotic blooms is that of one drawn to the unknown, the uncommon, the aesthetically venturesome.

[...]

The appearance of the jasmine as the first flower of the herbarium is symbolic of that aspect of Emily Dickinson's life that is most associated with love and crisis. The poet some think of as a maiden recluse-very "spirituelle," as her minister's wife said of her appearance in death, had her own encounters with eros, as the "Master" literature and her many wistful, ardent, sometimes disappointed letters to Susan Dickinson make clear.

All sixty-six pages of Dickinson's herbarium can be seen at the Harvard Libraries website.

Complement Farr's thoroughly wonderful The Gardens of Emily Dickinson with Cynthia Nixon's beautiful reading of Dickinson's "While I was fearing it, it came," then revisit botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer on gardening and the secret of happiness.
UPDATE: The story of Dickinson's herbarium and its larger significance in the poet's work and world figures prominently in .

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Emily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry

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In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women, botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art, most famously in Beatrix Potter's scientific drawings of mushrooms and Margaret Gatty's stunning illustrated classification of seaweed.

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Stephen Hawking’s Charming Children’s Book about Time-Travel, Co-Written with His Daughter

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Stephen Hawking’s Charming Children’s Book about Time-Travel, Co-Written with His Daughter

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It's not uncommon for famous authors of "adult" literature to have also penned lesser-known but no less lovely children's books - take, for instance, those by Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Sylvia Plath. Famous scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to become the subject of a children's book rather than the author of one. But not so with Stephen Hawking, one of the great geniuses of our time, born on this day in 1942.

In 2007, Hawking wrote George's Secret Key to the Universe (public library | IndieBound) - a charming, imaginative story about the mesmerism of space and the allure of time-travel, featuring lovely semi-Sendakian crosshatch illustrations by Garry Parsons. What makes the book especially endearing is that Hawking co-wrote it with his daughter Lucy.

One morning, George - a little boy raised by lo-fi, bookish parents who believe technology is evil - discovers that his pet pig Freddy has disappeared. Befuddled, he traces Freddy's hoofprints to the neighboring house, where he meets a scientist named Greg and his daughter Annie.

Greg warms George up to science - "Science is a wonderful and fascinating subject that helps us understand the world around us and all its marvels," he says as he shows the boy the enchanting science behind everyday phenomena in the kitchen - and introduces him to his own "pet" of sorts, Cosmos. Cosmos is the world's most powerful computer and not only speaks but can also empower approved users to travel across space-time.

George is enormously excited about the prospect of time-travel, but he first needs to take the Oath of the Scientist - a promise to only use scientific knowledge for good - in order to become approved.

And so begin the adventures, on which George encounters black holes (and learns - of course! - about how Hawking radiation makes them slowly disintegrate) and floats across four billion years.

George's Secret Key to the Universe is bound to tickle curious young readers into falling in love with science. Complement it with Hawking's theory of everything, animated in 150 seconds, then revisit this fantastic 1991 Errol Morris documentary about Hawking.

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Stephen Hawking's Charming Children's Book about Time-Travel, Co-Written with His Daughter

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It's not uncommon for famous authors of "adult" literature to have also penned lesser-known but no less lovely children's books - take, for instance, those by Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Sylvia Plath. Famous scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to become the subject of a children's book rather than the author of one.

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This list defines 633 sciences, arts and studies of various degrees of respectability and rarity :)

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This list defines 633 sciences, arts and studies of various degrees of respectability and rarity :)

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Word List: Definitions of Sciences and Studies

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Definitions of words meaning sciences: ology words

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World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking died at the age of 76.

He died peacefully at his Cambridge home in the early hours of Wednesday, his family said.
Stephen Hawking is probably the most recognizable and admired scientist of recent times. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease, at age 21, he overcame debilitating illness to produce some of the most groundbreaking scientific theories in the last few centuries.
Hawking's goal has been no less than to understand the workings of the universe, devoting his life to uncovering "The Theory of Everything". Stephen Hawking might be disabled in body, but certainly not in his ambitions.

His life is an astonishing story of a man who faced enormous odds and went on to become one of the world's most famous scientists..

He has been and will be the most influential face of courage and inspiration for generations to be.
Here are some of his most insightful quotes which will inspire you to think bigger and to never get discouraged in life.
1.

"My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."

2.

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

3.

Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.

4.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

5.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

6.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

7.

I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image

8.

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn't prevent you doing well, and don't regret the things it interferes with. Don't be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

9.

"One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist"

10.

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

11.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

12.

I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

13.

Quiet People have the Loudest minds

14.

We are all different, but we share the same human spirit. Perhaps it's human nature that we adapt and survive.

15.

So next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.

16.

I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these 'how' and 'why' questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.

17.

Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious, and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.

18.

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose, and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.

19.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.

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Top 22 Stephen Hawking Quotes and Lessons That Will Inspire You To Think Bigger and Never Get Discouraged In Life

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World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking died at the age of 76. He died peacefully at his Cambridge home in the early hours of Wednesday, his family said. Stephen Hawking is probably the most recognizable and admired scientist of recent times.

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How the Universe Works: Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything, Animated in 150 Seconds

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How the Universe Works: Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything, Animated in 150 Seconds

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A Brief History of Time in no time at all.

Legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is among the greatest scientific minds in human history. In this charming animation for The Guardian's MadeSimple series, UK-based animation studio Scriberia - who also made the wonderful trailer for Oliver Burkeman's Antidote - condenses Hawking's expansive, mind-bending theories down to 150 seconds. Reminiscent in spirit of the RSA animations, though much better-executed creatively, the short video is the visual equivalent of the art of the soundbite.

Though undeniably delightful, I can't help but wonder whether such quick visual syntheses of the life's work of boundless genius might be our era's version of the aphorisms that Susan Sontag worried commodify wisdom. But let's go with optimism and hope that, rather than exercises in reductionism, formats like this are, as Neil deGrasse Tyson said of the soundbite, triggers for interest which "set a learning path into motion that becomes self-driven." In other words, let's hope this gets more people to read A Brief History of Time, one of these seven timeless reads about time.

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How the Universe Works: Stephen Hawking's Theory of Everything, Animated in 150 Seconds

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Legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is among the greatest scientific minds in human history. In this charming animation for The Guardian's MadeSimple series, UK-based animation studio Scriberia - who also made the wonderful trailer for Oliver Burkeman's Antidote - condenses Hawking's expansive, mind-bending theories down to 150 seconds.

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Stephen Hawking on the Meaning of the Universe

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Stephen Hawking on the Meaning of the Universe

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"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God," the trailblazing astronomer and leading figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century as she contemplated science, spirituality, and the human hunger for truth. Every great scientist in the century and a half since has been faced with this question, be it by personal restlessness or public demand. Einstein addressed it in answering a little girl's question about whether scientists pray. Quantum theory originator Max Planck believed that "science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature [because] we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve." His fellow Nobel laureate and quantum theory founding father Niels Bohr defied the sentiment in his incisive distinction between subjective and objective reality, noting that religions have always addressed the former, while science addresses the latter, which is measurable and therefore knowable. Wolfgang Pauli, whose groundbreaking scientific ideas were greatly influenced by Bohr's, concluded that the effort to reconcile science and religion "will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides."

It takes a mind of rare courage and insight to address this abiding question without falling into the most pernicious trap of all - that of artificial compatibilism; to take a lucid stance without fright of offense, then to explain the basis of that stance thoughtfully and sensitively, systematically dismantling every reflexive argument against it.

That is what Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) does in his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (public library) - a collection of ten enormous questions Hawking was asked regularly throughout his life, by children and elders, by entrepreneurs and political leaders, by men and women young and old attending his prolific lectures and public appearances, with answers drawn from his extensive personal archive of correspondence, notes, drafts, interviews, and essays. The book - which was conceived during Hawking's lifetime but finished only after his death with help from his family and academic colleagues, and proceeds from which benefit the Stephen Hawking Foundation and the Motor Neurone Disease Association - opens with the question that has bellowed in humanity's chest since science first confronted superstition: Is there a God?

Hawking - whom many consider the greatest scientist since Einstein and whose residual stardust was interred between Darwin's and Newton's in Westminster Abbey - enlists his disarming deadpan humor in placing the query in a personal context, then uses the fulcrum of his magnificent mind to pivot into the serious answer to the universal question:

For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it's possible that I've upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature. If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.

With an eye to the discovery, which began in antiquity and culminated with Kepler and Galileo, that "the heavens" are in fact a complex universe governed by discoverable and discernible physical laws, he builds upon his earlier reflections on the meaning of the universe and adds:

I believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind's greatest achievement, for it's these laws of nature - as we now call them - that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. The laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. In tennis, the ball always goes exactly where they say it will. And there are many other laws at work here too. They govern everything that is going on, from how the energy of the shot is produced in the players' muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet. But what's really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet, and everything else in the universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken - that's why they are so powerful and, when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too.

[...]

One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.

I use the word "God" in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century.

But even with the laws of nature conceded, Hawking recognizes that their existence still leaves room for religions to lay claim to the grandest question - how the universe and its laws began. He addresses the question both plainly and profoundly:

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.

[...]

Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let's imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter - stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances.

The second thing you need is energy. Even if you've never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.

So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things - awesome, beautiful, violent - but one thing you can't call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions.

The instinctual question is where all the matter, energy, and space came from - a question we hadn't been able to answer with more than mythological cosmogonies until the early twentieth century, when Einstein demonstrated that mass is a form of energy and energy a form of mass in what is now the best known equation in the history of the world: E=mc ². This reduces the ingredients of the "cosmic cookbook" from three to two, distilling the question to where the space and energy originated. Generations of scientists built upon each other's work to deliver the answer in the Big Bang model, which holds that in a single moment around 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe, with all its space and energy, ballooned into being out of the nothingness that preceded it.

Half a century after Nabokov's poetic admonition against common sense, Hawking echoes Carl Sagan's observation that common sense can blind us to the realities of the universe and addresses this deeply counterintuitive notion of generating something out of nothing:

As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were told that you never get something for nothing. But now, after a lifetime of work, I think that actually you can get a whole universe for free.

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called "negative energy."

To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he's not just making a hill - he's also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.

When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It's another law of nature.

So where is all this negative energy today? It's in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it's in space. This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion - laws that are among the oldest in science - space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.

I'll admit that, unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp, but it's true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, each pulling on each other by the force of gravity, acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things - the mass and energy we see today - is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space.

So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don't need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

This is where the wheels of our common-sense understanding screech to a frustrated halt - after all, in our daily lives, we can't just manifest a cone of ice cream or a long-lost lover with the snap of our fingers. But on the subatomic stratum undergirding our physical reality, things work differently - particles pop up at random times in random places only to disappear again, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, which seem downright mystical in their manifestation but are in fact discovered and calculable laws of the universe. Hawking explains:

Since we know the universe itself was once very small - perhaps smaller than a proton - this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded - a place to store all the negative energy needed to balance the books. But of course the critical question is raised again: did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur? In a nutshell, do we need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator.

Once again he illustrates this assault on our basic common-sense intuitions with that supreme lever of understanding, the analogy:

Imagine a river, flowing down a mountainside. What caused the river? Well, perhaps the rain that fell earlier in the mountains. But then, what caused the rain? A good answer would be the Sun, that shone down on the ocean and lifted water vapour up into the sky and made clouds. Okay, so what caused the Sun to shine? Well, if we look inside we see the process known as fusion, in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium, releasing vast quantities of energy in the process. So far so good. Where does the hydrogen come from? Answer: the Big Bang. But here's the crucial bit. The laws of nature itself tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

This explanation, Hawking points out, rests on the shoulders of Einstein's groundbreaking relativity theory - that daring leap of the imaginative intellect, which furnished the staggering revelation that space and time are a single entity comprising the basic fabric of the universe. Hawking writes:

Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It's so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it's almost perfectly black. It's gravitational pull is so powerful, it warps and distorts not only light but also time. To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole - well, assuming of course that it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces- it would actually stop. It stops not because it is broken, but because inside the black hole time itself doesn't exist. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the universe.

[...]

As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

Hawking concludes with his most direct, personal answer to the universal question:

It's my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there's a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Rather than dispiriting, this lucid awareness of our ephemerality can be the wellspring of our noblest, most deeply spiritual and spiritualizing impulses - a catalyst for finding holiness in the richness of life itself, in the splendor of this peculiar and irreplaceable planet, rooted in the awareness that, in the poetic words of naturalist Sy Montgomery, "our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom - and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine." Hawking channels this orientation of mind and spirit in a stirring passage from the book's introduction:

One day, I hope we will know the answers to all these questions. But there are other challenges, other big questions on the planet which must be answered, and these will also need a new generation who are interested and engaged, and have an understanding of science. How will we feed an ever-growing population? Provide clean water, generate renewable energy, prevent and cure disease and slow down global climate change? I hope that science and technology will provide the answers to these questions, but it will take people, human beings with knowledge and understanding, to implement these solutions. Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love. We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.

Complement this particular portion of Hawking's altogether magnificent Brief Answers to the Big Questions with Carl Sagan on science and mystery, Alan Lightman on nonreligious divinity in the known and the unknowable, and Buckminster Fuller's scientific revision of "The Lord's Prayer," then revisit poet Marie Howe's gorgeous tribute to Hawking.

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Search Results for "hawking" - Brain Pickings

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"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God," the trailblazing astronomer and leading figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century as she contemplated science, spirituality, and the human hunger for truth.

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I am thinking about time this morning - about how it expands and contracts in the open fist of memory, about how the same duration can feel like a blink or incline toward the infinite, or even do both at once. Eleven years ago today, Brain Pickings began - birthed by what feels like another self, one that was once myself but no longer is and never again will be, and yet tethered to who I am today by some invisible thread of personal sensibility woven by and of time. As I look back on my most important learnings from the first decade, I am thinking of Simone de Beauvoir and her meditation on how chance and choice make us who we are. I am thinking of Borges and his sublime refutation of time. But, above all, I am thinking of a poem by one of my favorite poets, the Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923-February 1, 2012), about my favorite number, pi - an ode to the most precise language of the universe, mathematics, in the most precise language on Earth, poetry.

When I read the poem at The Universe in Verse, I prefaced it with a few words about my lifelong love of pi as both an anchor of reality and a counterpoint to certainty. In pi resides a reminder that despite the rigor and devotion with which we may map reality, our maps are still maps - incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief - a mouse tail, a pigtail - is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside 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.

"Pi" appears in Szymborska's indispensable Map: Collected and Last Poems (public library), which also gave us her masterpieces "Life-While-You-Wait" and "Possibilities." Complement it with Szymborska on how our certitudes keep us small, why we read, and the importance of being scared.

For more highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor astrophysicist Janna Levin's reading of Adrienne Rich's tribute to women in astronomy, Amanda Palmer's reading of Neil Gaiman's feminist poem about science, poet Tracy K. Smith's ode to the Hubble Space Telescope, Rosanne Cash's reading of Adrienne Rich's homage to Marie Curie, Diane Ackerman's poem about our search for extraterrestrial life, playwright Sarah Jones's chorus-of-humanity tribute to Jane Goodall, and poet Elizabeth Alexander's stunning cautionary poem about the misuses of science - or watch the complete show for a two-hour serenade to science and the transformative power of poetry.

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An Ode to the Number Pi by Nobel-Winning Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska

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I am thinking about time this morning - about how it expands and contracts in the open fist of memory, about how the same duration can feel like a blink or incline toward the infinite, or even do both at once.

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The Secret to Learning Anything - Einstein's letter to his son

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The Secret to Learning Anything - Einstein's letter to his son

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Here comes a fine addition to history's greatest letters of fatherly advice from none other than Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18 1955) - brilliant physicist, proponent of peace, debater of science and spirituality, champion of kindness - who was no stranger to dispensing epistolary empowerment to young minds.

In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard "Tete" Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter, found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (public library) - the same wonderful anthology that gave us some of history's greatest motherly advice, Benjamin Rush's wisdom on travel and life, and Sherwood Anderson's counsel on the creative life. Einstein, who takes palpable pride in his intellectual accomplishments, speaks to the rhythms of creative absorption as the fuel for the internal engine of learning:

My dear Albert,

Yesterday I received your dear letter and was very happy with it. I was already afraid you wouldn't write to me at all any more. You told me when I was in Zurich, that it is awkward for you when I come to Zurich. Therefore I think it is better if we get together in a different place, where nobody will interfere with our comfort. I will in any case urge that each year we spend a whole month together, so that you see that you have a father who is fond of you and who loves you. You can also learn many good and beautiful things from me, something another cannot as easily offer you. What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous work shall not only be there for strangers but especially for my own boys. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life, when you are bigger, I will tell you about it.

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .

Be with Tete kissed by your

Papa.

Regards to Mama.

.

Complement the altogether excellent Posterity with Einstein on why we're alive and his heartening advice to a little girl who wanted to be a scientist, then revisit more timeless advice from famous dads: Ted Hughes, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck.

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The Secret to Learning Anything: Albert Einstein's Advice to His Son

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Here comes a fine addition to history's greatest letters of fatherly advice from none other than Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18 1955) - brilliant physicist, proponent of peace, debater of science and spirituality, champion of kindness - who was no stranger to dispensing epistolary empowerment to young minds.

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Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie 

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Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie 

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Few things are more disheartening to witness than the bile which small-spirited people of inferior talent often direct at those endowed with genius. And few things are more heartening to witness than the solidarity and support which kindred spirits of goodwill extend to those targeted by such loathsome attacks.

In 1903, Marie Curie (November 7, 1867-July 4, 1934) became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. It was awarded jointly to her and her husband, Pierre, for their pioneering research on radioactivity. On April 19, 1906, she was widowed by an accident all the more tragic for its improbability. While crossing a busy Parisian street on a rainy night, Pierre slipped, fell under a horse-drawn cart, and was killed instantly. Curie grieved for years. In 1910, she found solace in Pierre's protégé - a young physics professor named Paul Langevin, married to but separated from a woman who physically abused him. They became lovers. Enraged, Langevin's wife hired someone to break into the apartment where the two met and steal their love letters, which she promptly leaked to the so-called press. The press eviscerated Curie and portrayed her as "a foreign Jewish homewrecker."

Upon returning from a historic invitation-only science conference in Brussels, where she had met Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18 1955), Curie found an angry mob in front of her home in Paris. She and her daughters were forced to stay with a family friend.

Einstein considered Curie "an unpretentious honest person" with a "sparkling intelligence." When he got news of the scandal, he was outraged by the tastelessness and cruelty of the press - the tabloids had stripped a private situation of all humanity and nuance, and brought it into the public realm with the deliberate intention of destroying Curie's scientific reputation.

A master of beautiful consolatory letters and a champion of kindness as a central animating motive of life, Einstein wrote to Curie with wholehearted solidarity and support, encouraging her not to give any credence to the hateful commentaries in the press. The letter, found in Walter Isaacson's terrific biography Einstein: His Life and Universe (public library), is a testament to the generosity of spirit that accompanied Einstein's unparalleled intellect - a masterwork of what he himself termed "spiritual genius."

Einstein, who would later remark that "Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted," writes:

Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,

Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.

With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,

A. Einstein

Shortly after the scandal, Curie received her second Nobel Prize - this time in chemistry, for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. To this day the only person awarded a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, she endures as one of humanity's most visionary and beloved minds. The journalists who showered her with bile are known to none and deplored by all.

Complement with Kierkegaard on why haters hate and Anne Lamott's definitive manifesto for how to handle them, then revisit Mark Twain's witty and wise letter of support to Helen Keller when she was wrongly accused of plagiarism and Frida Kahlo's compassionate letter to Georgia O'Keeffe after the American painter was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

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Don't Heed the Haters: Albert Einstein's Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie in the Midst of Scandal

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Few things are more disheartening to witness than the bile which small-spirited people of inferior talent often direct at those endowed with genius. And few things are more heartening to witness than the solidarity and support which kindred spirits of goodwill extend to those targeted by such loathsome attacks.