Bugbox - The Center of Gravity

Black Holes on a Patch of Moss

Photo of Pixie-cup lichens — Pixie-cup lichens photographed in Finland by Noa Zilberman.

Pixie-cup lichens belong to the genus Cladonia. They take their charming common name from their tiny funnel-shaped cups, although "black-hole lichens" seems equally fitting to me (despite being considerably easier to photograph than their astrophysical counterparts).

Like other lichens, they are composite organisms: a partnership between a fungus and a photosynthetic partner, usually an alga. The fungus provides the structure, while the alga captures sunlight and produces food. This brings to mind the essential collaboration between theory and experiment: one gives ideas their structure, while the other supplies the nourishment that allows them to grow.

Perhaps the deeper analogy is that their interaction creates something neither could produce independently. Like lichens, science flourishes through symbiosis.
_{Contributed by Noa Zilberman}

Angina Pectoris

Continue this trip to the outer worlds: Angine de Poitrine

_{With thanks to our friend Emanuele Berti for bringing this fantastic band to our attention.}

A Stranger's Wisdom

Embroidered Panel, Iran, late 16th–early 17th century, velvet, cotton, and metal-wrapped thread, the Hossein Afshar Collection. (Credit: Houston Museum of Fine Arts) — Embroidered panel, Iran, late 16th–early 17th century. The Hossein Afshar Collection. (Credit: Houston Museum of Fine Arts).

Well, a wiser fellow than myself once said, "Sometimes you eat the b’ar… sometimes the b’ar, well, he eats you.

— The Stranger ("The Big Lebowski”, 1998, written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)

^{Contributed by CoGu}

Dersu Uzala

Read:
"Dersu Uzala". Written by Vladimir Arsenyev (1923). University Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Watch:
"Dersu Uzala". Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Mosfilm, U.S.S.R. (1975)
Look up:
The asteroid "4142 Dersu-Uzala" orbits the sun every 965 days.

^{Contributed by Ana Carvalho & Vitor Cardoso}

Profounder, profounder, man’s spirit must dive

Composer, conductor, and communicator Leonard Bernstein set for himself in 1973 the impossible task of analysing music through the lens of linguistics during his Norton Lectures as Harvard’s Poetry Chair. The lectures, though flawed, are an example of intellectual inquiry and courage. They invite us to cross borders of thought and listen for unanswered questions across realms of knowledge.

His first lecture is especially suggestive for any physicist. In it, Bernstein explains and illustrates the harmonic series as the sequence of vibrational overtones of a string: music is just poetry woven with the laws of physics. In the last decade we have begun to hear the first phrase of spacetime itself, listening the gravitational ringing of black holes. Their own overtone sequence, however, is remarkably non-tonal, breaking the same sacred aesthetic principle organising Bernstein’s grammar.

Nonetheless, the trumpet line that asks The Unanswered Question in Charles Ives’ composition that christens Bernstein’s lectures is also non-tonal: it climbs and falters along the harmonic series, ever skeptical of the choir of flutes, ever insisting, never reaching home, hence unanswered, whither music. We shall go yet one step further, into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Sphinx”, the poem that probably inspired Ives’ piece, and take its advice seriously: let’s take our quest through nature, ever profounder, venturing into the universal grammar not of music, but of the Universe itself.

^{Contributed by Jaime Redondo-Yuste}

And so on to Infinity

Robert Fludd's "Et sic in inifinitum" — Image: Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia [Tractatus secundus de naturae simia seu technica macrocosmi historia]. Engraving by: Johann Theodor de Bry. Image source: Wellcome Collection.

In 1617, philosopher, physician, cosmologist and alchemist Robert Fludd published “Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atqve Technica Historia” (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser). Early on in the book, on a chapter discussing the origins of the universe, Fludd contemplates the nothingness that may have preceded those beginnings. This he illustrates with the image of a simple black square. On each of the square’s four sides, he wrote “Et sic in infinitum” (And so on to infinity). And with that, he managed the extraordinary feat of extending the black square beyond the page, while giving us, his readers, the chance to follow suit, into infinity.

^{Contributed by Ana Carvalho}