- Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950)
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Effulgent Forms
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Between Grief and Geometry
- Michael Frame (1951 - )
Geometry of Grief
Friday, October 21, 2022
Harmony of Autumnal Colors
is immediately excited,
and it is its nature,
spontaneously and of necessity,
at once to produce another,
which with the original colour
comprehends the whole chromatic scale.
A single color excites,
by a specific sensation,
the tendency to universality.
In this resides the fundamental
law of all harmony of colors.
...
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Monday, October 17, 2022
Serendipitous Geometry
- Paul Rand (1914 - 1996)
Paul Rand: A Designer's Art
Postscript. It has been said that the lifeblood of photography is serendipity. While none of the images that make up the triptych above are particularly praiseworthy (beyond, I hope, simply being "interesting" to look at for a a few seconds), the fact that they exist at all is serendipitous. As seems to happen so often, what I planned to photograph and what I found myself photographing this past Sunday are unrelated except that the latter followed naturally - if unpredictably - from the former. Waking up to see a completely overcast sky I rushed to the kitchen to pour a bit of coffee into my commuter cup and took off in my car to go to one of my favorite "cloudy day" parks (Great Falls park in northern VA), about an hour from home. The closer I got to the park, the more "blue sky" was elbowing the clouds away, until, finally, literally as I arrived, the sky had become crystal clear and a strong sun was beating down overhead; far from the quiet diffused light I expected and was rushing over to compose in. Nothing to do but turn around and head back home. Which is what I did, but not before listening to my muse and stopping by the parking lot my wife and I leave our car at when we go to the farmer's market held nearby on Saturdays. Since it was Sunday, the parking lot was deserted, and I had plenty of time to commiserate over a failed trip to Great Falls, rekindle the quiet joy of just being "mindfully in the moment," and rediscover the simple pleasure of looking for "geometric designs" with my camera. As I said, nothing spectacular or noteworthy, and a far cry from what I originally planned to do, but a thoroughly delightful outing nonetheless 😊
Friday, October 07, 2022
Unfolding of the Universe
"We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe."
"Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don't chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before."
Thursday, September 01, 2022
Ephemeral Sights
- Bill Jay (1940 - 2009)
"And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually."
- Jimi Hendrix (1942 - 1970)
"All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered."
- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Order and Chaos
- Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)
"Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems."
- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Light Prancing
It can be found anywhere far from
where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep."
- Paul Strand (1890 - 1976)
Postscript. These images were all captured within minutes of each other in a garage near a local farmer's market this past weekend, as I was waiting for my wife to gather our grocery bags to go shopping. I have written before about how mesmerizing the "abstract cacophony" of shimmering reflections off car's hoods and hubcaps are to a photographer's eye 😊 What is hard to express in words (though I'm obviously trying, obliquely), is how joyful these few minutes' worth of prancing back and forth in-between park cars inevitably are to my soul (I look forward to my "light prancing" almost as much as the delicious recipes my wife cooks up with what we gather at the market!) My only regret (as usual) is that all I had with me was an iPhone.
Embrace light.
Admire it.
Love it.
But above all, know light.
Know it for all you are worth,
and you will know
the key to photography."
- George Eastman (1854 - 1932)
Friday, August 12, 2022
Structure of Life
- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Letters & Images
Monday, August 08, 2022
Atoms with Consciousness
There are the rushing waves…
mountains of molecules, each stupidly
minding its own business… trillions apart…
yet forming white surf in unison.
before any eyes could see…
year after year…
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?…
on a dead planet,
with no life to entertain.
tortured by energy…
wasted prodigiously by the sun…
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
repeat the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves…
and a new dance starts.
masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing
a pattern ever more intricate.
here it is standing…
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity.
wonders at wondering…
...I…
a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Untitled Ode to the Wonder of Life,
Quoted by Maria Popova (1984 - ), The Marginalian
Saturday, August 06, 2022
Mysterious Animal
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Geometric Patterns
"Every place is given its
character by certain patterns of
events that keep on happening there.
These patterns of events
are locked in with certain
geometric patterns in the space.
...
"I believe that all centers
that appear in space -
whether they originate in biology,
in physical forces, in pure geometry,
in color - are alike simply in that
they all animate space.
It is this animated space that
has its functional effect
upon the world, that determines
the way things work, that governs
the presence of harmony and life.
...
"All space and matter,
organic or inorganic,
has some degree of life in it,
and matter/space is more alive
or less alive according to
its structure and arrangement."
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
Friday, July 15, 2022
Secret of the Sea
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)
"Time is more complex near
the sea than in any other place,
for in addition to the circling
of the sun and the turning
of the seasons, the waves
beat out the passage of time
on the rocks and the tides rise
and fall as a great clepsydra."
- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Like Lichen on Rock
It swells like a balloon; it moves,
circles, slows, and vanishes.
Friday, July 08, 2022
Loosely Conjoined Cells of a Tissue
- Lewis Thomas (1913 - 1993)
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Saturday, February 12, 2022
Nothing is Dead
there was blackness,
pure and beautiful Nothing.
There was no thing in it,
no star, no wind,
no light, no word,
no broken heart.
But a time came when perfect,
restful Nothing was to vanish
forever. Something was
about to be.
Suddenly, there it was.
Something, all alone, king
of everything. Killer
of ancient, beautiful
Nothing. There was
a silence.
...till Nothing screamed
a death scream and
that scream is still screaming,
an expanding ring into the
universe that will never end.
Nothing is dead…"
- Joseph Pintauro (1930 - 2018)
To Believe in Things
Sunday, February 06, 2022
Cosmic Sea of Energy
It is full, a plenum
as opposed to a vacuum,
and is the ground for
the existence of everything,
including ourselves.
The universe is not separate
from this cosmic sea
of energy.
quantum interconnectedness
is that the whole universe
is enfolded in everything,
and that each thing is
enfolded in the whole."
Saturday, February 05, 2022
Mathematical Beauty
world is made manifest
in Form and Number,
and the heart and soul
and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are
embodied in the concept
of mathematical beauty."
- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
Postscript. As may be the case with many of you, my day-job constraints leave me precious little time to devote to purely aesthetic pleasures (notwithstanding those that occasionally overlap with more mathematical pursuits). Sometimes, as now, even my weekend time is filled mostly with staring at gibberish on a computer screen, and pounding away at my keyboard to produce picture-less reams of technical reports (even as I day-dream of month-long photo-safaris in far-away lands). Thus, the short walks my wife and I take through our neighborhood after breakfast each day have become immeasurably important physical and spiritual oases for me. The simple pleasure of encountering beautifully haphazard arrangements of natural forms rejuvenates and nourishes my soul. The images in the triptych above were taken no more than a few minutes apart during a walk that itself lasted less than a half hour. But what a joy it is to stumble upon such humble transcendent beauty hiding in plain sight! The great polymath Thompson's book, On Growth and Form (the first edition of which came out in 1917, and which to this day remains an extraordinarily beautiful book to read) is essentially a 1100+ page erudite argument that biology can be reduced to mathematics (a sentiment that a much younger version of myself would have been happy to accept): "It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. It is but the slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that we can hope to have until the physicist and the mathematician shall have made these problems of ours their own." For those of you interested in exploring (taking a deep-dive, really, into) the broader entanglement of art and science, here are some slides I used for a 2017 presentation at a Humanities and Technology Association conference (held that year in Newport, RI). This lecture is one of three I've given in (relatively) recent years during which I wore both of my hats, as physicist and photographer. The other two lectures were given at the American Center for Physics (College Park, MD in 2009) and at the Morrison House (Alexandria, VA in 2011).
Sunday, January 30, 2022
New Riddles
- Alfred Noyes (1880 - 1958)
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Early Morning Walk
a blessing for the whole day."
- Frédéric Gros (1965 - )
A Philosophy of Walking