Tag Archives: science and art

Overture to a cave; the spectacle of jointing in ancient basalt lava flows

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Saturday August 8, 1829, Felix Mendelssohn and his traveling companion Karl Klingemann, took a boat trip to Fingal’s Cave, the entrance to a world beneath Staffa, an inconspicuous dot on the edge of the Atlantic. Staffa is part of the Hebrides Archipelago, west Scotland. Celtic legend called it Uahm Binn, ‘The Cave of Melody’, that in story was part of a bridge extending to the iconic Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim (Northern Ireland).  The Celtic name is apt; Atlantic swells echoing countless songs.  Klingemann later wrote “Fingal’s Cave…its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.”. Continue reading

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Galileo’s finger

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“Their final resting place…” a sepulchral phrase, redolent of a fate that awaits us all.  There is no doubt as to its finality, but resting…?  A nice metaphor that may convey a sense of comfort to the living, rather than the deceased.  Wander through any church or cathedral in Europe and Britain, and you will inevitably walk over cold marble slabs, engraved with the details of those who lie beneath, polished by the feet of a myriad worshipers and tourists.  The Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence is, in many respects, like any other magnificent church; it is old, construction beginning in 1295, with alterations and additions during the 14th -15th century overlapping the earlier Gothic forms.  The Basilica is stunning, but differs from many of its contemporaries in that it became THE place in Italy to be buried. Continue reading

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A very British Library

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Book stratigraphy

Being acquainted with things that are really ancient, is an everyday experience for a geologist; fossils and other flotsam of lives past, meteorites as old as the solar system itself. Records of these ancient lives, their successes and failures, of catastrophes, of ancient worlds, are written in every chip of rock, every grain of sand. We marvel at these stories, at their old-ness. My recent visit to the British Library in London was a reminder that our written history is also ancient, but counted in millennia rather than eons.  I’m talking books and parchment, not carved cuneiform tablets. These treasures are housed in a room of the same name, light and humidity controlled, protected from hands that would love to turn the pages. Sensible precautions of course; many of these pieces would probably disintegrate at the slightest touch.  I’d never seen the sole-surviving copy of Beowulf, an original Gutenberg or King James Bible, the Magna Carta, a 3rd Century fragment of a Gospel, a Thomas Tallis liturgical composition. So many documents that record our history and inform our present. Continue reading

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Dali Wasn’t Nuts; the Creativity of Science

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Art can be thought of as (among other things) the construction of sensory (conscious and subconscious) images; images conveyed by the artist or construed by the audience.  Science on the other hand is often thought of as the construction of hypotheses and theories, of grand ideas. In the vocabulary of science, words and phrases like logical analysis and objectivity are deemed central to the whole process of doing science and frequently are used to set it apart from other human endeavors, like art, at least in the minds of those who like such distinctions.  But images are also central to science. We create them whenever we talk of evolutionary lineages, of Schrodinger’s Cat, double helixes, nano-particles and atomic tunnels.  In my own discipline, whenever I think of James Hutton’s (1785) discovery of deep time (geological), I don’t think of him engrossed in syllogisms, but in some intriguing mix of reason and creative wondering at the world he observed.  The syllogisms probably came later.  There is creative thinking in science; it is the same creativity that emboldens the painter and poet to explore the internal and external universe they see. Creativity is not just a useful add-on to the progression of science, its so-called method; it is a vital part of discovery and invention.  Without it science would be little more than a collection of data. These ideas are not new; many scientists have espoused them. But they are worth reiterating. Continue reading

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