“Only connect,” EM Forster urged and in Popova’s thrilling world of mathematics, nature, music and poetry, everything is connected, especially the humans, especially the women although the men are not forgotten either, especially Walt Whitman who haunts these pages. She tells how Nikola Tesla’s invention of the self-starting alternating current motor started with “an enchanting sunset in Budapest Park” inspiring him “to recite a Goethe stanza, which suddenly gave him the vision of a rotating magnetic field.” Popova beautifully closes the artificial gap that has arisen over the years between the two disciplines: “They forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends,” she quotes Goethe.
Like Popova, these characters love poetry as much as they love mathematics. They encounter much prejudice and difficulty yet their ground-breaking work in literature, art, feminism, astronomy and mathematics has been instrumental in the development of our world. Several brilliant women feature in the interlinked biographies which follow Kepler’s story, including astronomer Maria Mitchell, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, feminist Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson, sculptor Harriet Hosmer and ending with Rachel Carson, mother of the global environmental movement. a letter from his sister has informed him that their widowed mother is on trial for witchcraft – a fact for which he holds himself responsible.” How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness?”Īnd then thrillingly as in a novel, the second chapter flings us into a seventeenth century carriage with Johannes Kepler as he races “through the icy alabaster expanse of the countryside.
all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality-it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass. The choice of the verb “composed” is apposite here because this indefinable book often reads like the poetry which means so much to Popova’s heroes while themes and motifs return as in music with renewed beauty and meaning.įiguring begins with a prelude and unrolls like a poem – chapter zero is a sustained incantation, “All of it-the rings of Saturn. ," says Maria Popova on her renowned Brainpickings website. and the most beautiful, difficult, disorienting experience.
0 kommentar(er)
