Reading “The Wake”: a metaphor for doing science

I’ve just started reading Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake. I’ve never read anything quite like it – in writing style, tone, or storyline. The piece that comes closest to its elegiac, portentous, and historic style is perhaps Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English – which I’ve read only in translation from that long forgotten…

The Invention of Nature: Serendipity, Early Scientists, and Modern Ideas

I recently read an article in The New York Times that described serendipity not as a random stroke of luck, which we usually perceive it to be, but as something people actively cultivate. The highest level of serendipity is attributed to people who constantly take in tidbits of information, stashing them away in pockets of…