A Summer Science Poem

It’s summer. The perfect time to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Or, if that proves too taxing, just flop onto the grass and watch all the little invertebrates toiling away: an ant carrying a crumb or a seed, a beetle scurrying over grains of sand, a grasshopper leaping. Beneath the surface is a vast […]

Science Metaphors (cont.): Critical Opalescence

I’m aging.  I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain.  I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains.  I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head.  I can’t keep […]

Math, Artists, and Crop Circles

Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s.  A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.”   They seem to have no larger meaning, […]

Abstruse Goose: The Sum of All Knowledge

Pay attention to the quote below the drawing.  John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up.   He died in 2008 at age 96. I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, […]

Abstruse Goose

Abstruse Goose is a nameless, faceless entity, obviously a mathematician of some sort, who posts extremely funny but occasionally abstruse cartoons at http://abstrusegoose.com. http://abstrusegoose.com/275