Who'd a Thunk it?

Einstein did. That's who.

For years, I taught Hamlet, itself a sublime human achievement, in which Hamlet opines, "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!"

I thought of that speech (without Hamlet's cynicism) this morning when I read that the LIGO team had heard what the New York Times called "a cosmic chirp [that] vindicates Einstein."

  

Elsewhere in today's paper, Lawrence M. Krauss wrote, "Too often people ask, what's the use of science like this, if it doesn't produced faster cars or better toasters. But people rarely ask the same question about a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. Such pinnacles of human creativity change our perspective of our place in the universe. Science, like art, music and literature, has the capacity to amaze and excite, dazzle and bewilder. I would argue that it is that aspect of science -- it cultural contribution, its humanity -- that is perhaps its most important feature."

Count me among those who doesn't ask the use. Science is amazing, and this "music" is dazzling.

Intersections

I

A former student, from many years ago, sent me a message that said, "You always were interested in advances in all areas. I recall in English class your telling us about black holes and what scientists were learning about them." I don't remember this, but I trust her. I have always wanted to know more, especially about the physical world.

II

In tenth grade, I sometimes spent lunch in the biology lab, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I looked, and looked, and looked at anything I put under the microscope. 

III

A camp friend posted a video on her Facebook today of Tim Minchin, an Australian musician/actor/comedian making a graduation speech. In his life list of "nine life lessons," he told the audience that science and art are not separate: "Science is not a body of knowledge nor belief system. It is just a term which describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome."

IV

Another friend alerted me to a New Yorker article titled "Creativity Creep." Joshua Rothman writes, "This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it's a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don't make anything, we regard that as a problem -- we say that you're blocked. . . . Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity's stillness. If you're really creative, really imaginative, you don't have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel. Coleridge, in his poem "Frost at Midnight," uses, as his metaphor for the creative imagination, the frost, which freezes the evening dew into icicles 'quietly shining up at the quiet moon.' The poem begins: 'The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind.' The secret, silent, delicate, and temporary work of the frost is creativity, too. It doesn't build, but it transforms. It doesn't last, but it matters."

V

People always ask me two questions: "Do you sell your photographs?" and "Who is the intended audience for your blog?"

I want to answer What does it matter?

What matters is that both transform.