"Life took me by the shoulder..."

One afternoon soon after her death, I entered her empty room, into which the good evening sun was shining, gladdening it with rose-bright, gay and soft colors. There I saw on the bed the things which the poor lady had till recently worn, her dress, her hat, her sunshade, and her umbrella, and, on the floor, her small delicate boots. The strange sight of them made me unspeakably sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it seem to me almost that I had died myself…. For a long time I looked at Frau Wilke’s possessions, which now had lost their mistress and lost all purpose, and at the golden room, glorified by the smile of the evening sun….

Yet, after standing there dumbly for a time, I was gratified and grew calm. Life took me by the shoulder and its wonderful gaze rested on mine. The world was as living as ever and beautiful as at the most beautiful time. I quietly left the room and went out into the street.

from Frau Wilke by Robert Walser, extracted here.

Matter, a photograph by August Sander (1925), here.

Zodiacal Light

There is something else [besides planets, asteroids, comets etc] that fills the interstices of our solar system every so slightly, a component of interplanetary dust. Tiny grains of silicates and carbon-rich material are spread in an enormous and tenuous haze that blankets the inner planets. Distributed in the form of a puffed-up disk, this cloud reaches from around the orbit of Jupiter to within that of Mercury.

At their largest these grains are only a tenth of a millimetre across...and they number no more than one in every cubic kilometer. But...the solar system is a very big place, and a colossal number of these particles spread across local space can scatter and reflect light just as if they were motes glimmering in a sunbeam as they float across a room.

...Ancient Islamic astronomers called this glow in the heavens the “false dawn,” since it can...appear in the east an hour or so before the sun rises – as if time itself disappears and the Sun returns early to light up the world again. In fact it's not so much the world that's being illuminated, but the framework of the solar system, a dusty impression of the alignment of the planets in their huge disk of orbital paths, and of all the other objects sharing this same space...

–  from The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf (2014)

Image: Jack Fusco via APOD

A space of possibility

Parmenides argued that, contrary to outward appearances (and to Heraclitus), existence is uniform and timeless, and change impossible. The objective world, Hermann Weyl added, simply is; it does not happen:

Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

Compare/contrast Nan Shepard on Coire an Lochan:

[The] changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming.

Parmenides, writes Raymond Tallis [1], “overlooks the space of possibility that is the world we collectively create and in which we live lives steeped in the presence of the past and anticipation of the future”:

...[But] notwithstanding the invalidity of his conclusion, there is, at the heart of his vision, a fundamental truth: namely, that the object of knowledge (captured in a name, a thought, a proposition) is static compared with our experiences.

Note [1] In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections (2012)

Image: Melencolia (1514) by Albrecht Dürer (Wikipedia). Carl Galle argues the picture may be about overcoming melancholy, an optimistic parable on the struggle for knowledge.

Crazier and more of it than we think

In De rerum varietate (On the variety of things) of 1557, Girolamo Cardano provides a taxonomy of wonders: 'wonder of the earth', 'wonders of water.'   As Philip Ball notes in Curiosity (2012):

He argues that while some things are truly wonderful (and perhaps beyond rational explanation), others are 'worthy of wonder, but not great wonder', and some are simply not marvelous at all. In the first of these classes he places the 'blue clouds' said to be sighted in the Straights of Magellan off the tip of the South America, and in the second, the foot jugglers of Mexico.'

A contemporary catalogue of wonders might contain different examples from the ones chosen by Cardono yet be much the same in spirit. 

Still, what we find wonderful is also historically contingent. Our maps are vastly more extensive and detailed than those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to the physicist George Ellis our view at the largest and smallest scales "is approaching what will ever be possible."  But, he says, "complexity is almost unbounded." So it's likely that many of the greatest future wonders will be 'inward' ones relating to the complexities of life and mind.  See Snow by Louis MacNeice.

Image:  A Line Made by Walking, Richard Long

an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world

A murmuration of starlings appears to mirror a quantum phenomenon:

[a] new model is mathematically identical to the equations that describe superfluid helium. When helium is cooled close to absolute zero, it becomes a liquid with no viscosity at all, as dictated by the laws of quantum physics.

Image: murmuration at Netivot via TheFabWeb.com

Seeing things

Newton’s wrong guesses are...as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since.

-- Andrew Crumey in Aeon

Image: iridescent cloud above Thamserku, a 6,600-meter peak in Nepal by Oleg Bartunov via APOD

Ribosome

The ribosome is a tiny organelle present in all living cells in thousands of copies that manufactures the protein molecules on which all life is based. It effectively operates as a highly organized and intricate miniature factory, churning out those proteins – long chain-like molecules – by stitching together a hundred or more amino acid molecules in just the right order, and all within a few seconds. And this exquisitely efficient entity is contained within a complex chemical structure that is some 20-30 nanometres in diameter – just 2-3 millionths of a centimetre.

-- from What is Life? by Addy Pross

Added 27 October 2014: Listen to this section of Radiolab's translation show.

Added 26 Jan 2015: "We are all just different kinds of homes to the ribosomes!"


Image: David S. Goodsell, the Scripps Research Institute via RSBC Protein Data Bank