Variety

I realized during last November’s NanoWrimo that posting an entire novel on-line without “commercial interruptions”, as it were, is not the optimal use of the weblog as a medium. A daily posting needs variety. Otherwise people start to cross their eyes, everything goes blurry, pictures begin to shift around on the walls, and before you know it, devoted blog readers everywhere are speaking in tongues and levitating small household objects.

So consider today’s post as a friendly message from your sponsor.

While I’m here, I might as well talk about something. In particular, a snatch of a conversation I had over coffee yesterday. A colleague and I were discussing the fact that there is woefully insufficient cultural cross-over between the interests of art and the interests of science. I’m not talking about weird stuff like “an abstract interpretive dance about quantum theory.” Rather, a genuine merging of these two great human quests — the quest for aesthetic/emotional meaning and the quest for objective truth.

Soon after that point in the conversation I found myself, unexpectedly, telling my colleague: “I might be one of the few people I know who loves to do science that also really really cares why Austen had Elizabeth Bennet start to realize she likes Mr. Darcy in that particular chapter, rather than two chapters before or two chapters after.”

The person I was talking to knew exactly what I was getting at. I’m sure there are lots of people identified as “scientists” who share my passion for such questions. It would just be nice if there were more of us!