Drawing Boxes vs. Shading Them In

One of the fascinating things about new technologies or scientific discoveries is how they expose the cracks in our understanding of the world. New distinctions present themselves as evidence emerges to challenge the categories we previously constructed.

There are tons of examples of this, but one that I particularly like is a historical example. Aristotle devised a method of categorizing living creatures and after his death until the fifteenth-century, that system worked pretty well for European and Middle-Eastern scholars. Animals and plants fit into neat and tidy categories and their commonalities were explained by the relations of those categories. It wasn't until the return of settlers from the New World, who brought back new kinds of animals, did this paradigm shift.

If your system decrees that birds and mammals are different because one lays eggs and has a beak, then your system works mostly fine right up until the discovery of the platypus. Previously a distinction that seemed so complete, so useful, is gone and you're forced to redefine what you mean by mammal.

Radical change can seem small when seen up close. I was deep in the weeds, reading again about Mr. George Starkey, a doctor and alchemist living in London in the 1650s. Starkey's life has been a subject of some study by historians of science precisely because a lot of his work survives. We have his numerous published works, those of his contemporaries, and his especially valuable private work diaries.

It was in the passages of one of these diaries that Dr. Lawrence Principe and Dr. William Newman puzzled through precisely how Starkey and his collaborators (Newton, Boyle, and Van Helmont) formulated and practiced what would become the modern scientific method. Starkey, for example, records his experiments in a traditional Scholastic style. In those days schools taught using a method derived originally from Roman jurisprudence later adopted for use in theology: the disputation. There were multiple kinds of disputation, but in each two people debated the merits of a question or quaestio. The important change: Starkey's opponent is Nature herself. He worked with his alchemical furnace to burn, boil, and distill the essence of matter. Hence where Starkey's experiments fail he writes that his question has been refuted by the fire.

[Starkey] actually carried his Scholastic education into the laboratory and used it there. At the same time he augmented the standard divisions of argument with new categories more appropriate to his practical experimentation, such as his "Observations," "Conjectural Conclusions," "Notables," and "Hands-On Trials."

Newman & Principe, pg 171.

It was a sweltering August day. I made my way across the promenade, and through the bustling crowd, to a small line forming outside the Timkin Art Museum. Inside, I stumbled on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Parable of the Sower, painted in 1557, nearly five centuries ago.

When Bruegel took his brush to this canvas, the New World had just been found by Europeans, and the United States was still long into the future. Around me then were all those people, those wandering souls, who across those centuries stood before this same piece and idly mused at a thing made by the hands of a long-dead Flemish man.

I thought about him. Not Bruegel—another man—one whom I've come to know these past few years. He does not know of me, yet we both could have seen this very painting. We were connected through the mists of time by this canvas portal to the past.

As with seemingly every other man my age, I've taken up running to stay fit. Your metabolism slows as you age and what used to come for free with youth now takes time and deliberate effort to maintain. I don't care for the running, but it needs to be done.

The thing is: it does give me lots of idle time to think, just like a long walk. Both have become for me a form of meditation, a way to de-stress and to mull over complex ideas. I find that I think better when I'm moving, regardless of precisely how. Yet, near the end of every run my thoughts inevitably return to the same idea:

When will this be over? I want to be done.

There is a difference between knowing something, and truly understanding it. I think we've all had those moments, the ones where a truth you learned a long time ago really sits with you for the first time. It rests in your mind and stretches out, finally showing off the great expanse of nuance hidden deep within.

Most nights when you happen to spy the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus sitting in a line in the sky, you see them as the dots beside a crescent that they are. Yet sometimes, when framed amid the sunset sky above the wisps of silver cloud, you see them differently. You realize in that moment that you, your great-grandparents, Julius Caesar, and Aristotle all saw this same sky. It has always been for us. We know so much about Jupiter and Venus today, yet no human eye has ever seen more than you're seeing now.

I think we are all, in this time, realizing the true power of words and what they mean, not to those who speak, but to those who listen.