A friend sent me this (old! 2002) story from The Guardian Unlimited today, an excerpt from Graham Farmelo’s book It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, and it made me think lots of appreciative thoughts about human perception and the kinds of people who are able to make such meaningful connections and perceive and understand the world so holistically.

The first such person I met was my wonderful chem professor at Cal Poly, Grant Venerable, who I met while I was still in high school and who encouraged me to write a paper for credit comparing Shakespeare to chemistry (I still have the paper somewhere, typed onto that funny translucent erasable paper, using a portable Smith-Corona).

The Guardian story also reminded me of two books that I bought and never got around to reading: Cross Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry, by Gary Paul Nabham, and Water and Dreams: An Essay On the Imagination of Matter, by Gaston Bachelard, which had been highly recommended to me when I started Hybrid Vigor. Now out of print, the cheapest copy on Amazon is $129. Glad I kept mine.

I’m also about to start reading Sharon Begley’s new book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. Begley, a terrific science writer, most recently as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, used as the foundation of her book a yearly gathering of Buddhist monks and neuroscientists on the subject of neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to physically change in response to stimuli or activity. Intro and foreword were written by Daniel Goleman and HH Dalai Lama, so you get the drift. Very exciting stuff happening here; I’ll write more about it soon.