Goosebumps

Your ancient ancestors were small hairy little animals that would puff up when startled like a cat does when it feels threatened--a biological response to alarm which protected them from attack by making them look bigger than they were. You have kept this response in an interesting way.

You notice this residual response of hair follicles standing at attention when you are lucky enough to have someone kiss your neck or are moved by a song. The feeling is goosebumps. Next time you are surprised by a kiss or see something beautiful and amazing, remember, you have your ancient mammalian ancestors to thank.

If you go back further, before flowers and birds, grass and animals, you would find an ocean full of what looked like large nubby rocks. These odd structures imparted an untold number of qualities to their future descendants--plants and animals.

Just what did they pass on to people? Scientifically that answer could get way too complicated and maybe boring. For me just casually observing the fossil remains of these amazing algae/bacterial structures that flourished 3.5 billion years ago, I am struck by the beautiful growth patterns.

Cut pieces of these stromatolites look to me like shards of Greek pottery. I'm not sure what qualities we inherited from these ancient structures. But when I consider that a beautiful fossil of a stromatolite is in a way a very distant ancestor of man and that the art men created in ancient Greece retains similar aesthetic qualities--it gives me goosebumps.

Shards of Greek pottery

Stromatolite fossil

More Greek pottery shards

The lover of Apollo

One day long ago a man lay dying in the Amazon rainforest. He had malaria and had found his way to the bank of a tributary to be near the cool water. Racked by fever, he looked up and saw a little blue flower. It seemed like a hallucination, because he had been searching for it for so long. That little blue flower had only been seen a handful of times by less than a handful of people, and he had searched until his body broke and he was near death. And now above his head near the river, there it was growing on a tree. He was so happy to see the flower that it pulled him right back into the world, and he did not die that day.

Now anyone can order that flower on the Internet and grow it on their kitchen counter, just to throw it away after it blooms. There was a time when a man would spend years of his life, risk death and often die for a flower.

That flower was the small blue orchid, Aganisia cyanea, named after the lover of the god Apollo.
And the man whose life was saved by that little flower was Richard Evans Schultes.

You would know much less about a lot of things if it weren't for that man.
Schultes was driven to explore by that flower.
Schultes introduced the Amazon rainforest to the rest of the world.
He was not motivated by gold or treasure.
All he wanted was that flower--and he found it, and it saved his life.
Through his adventures Schultes gave science and medicine a lot along the way.

In a way, you owe a lot to that little flower.

Richard Evans Schultes in the Amazon

Forged

These shards of metal I drew are how I imagine a crystaline state of 55-Nitinol

Gold, because it is easy to work with and never tarnishes, has always been cherished. It shimmers like the sun and is born in the violence of stars--spat out by them in their last moments as suns. Gold is a star's last gift to the universe, before it blinks away forever. It is no wonder that we adorn ourselves with gold. It is amazing stuff. 

55-Nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy, is amazing in a much different way. It looks like any other metal. A little drab. Maybe in need of a polish. But, 55-Nitinol does a magical trick.

Imagine that in your spare time you like to play around with molten metals in your garage. Imagine that you carve a love letter or your favorite recipe into a block of wood. Then imagine preparing a mold of this carved block and slowly pouring molten 55-Nitinol (heated to a very precise temperature) into the mold. Then, you would make yourself some tea, sit back, and wait.

In a few hours, you would return to your metal shop, crack open the mold and there it would be: a boring silver-grey declaration of your love or your grandmother's recipe for pineapple upside-down cake. In your hands you would hold a heavy slab of metal, now inscribed with your sentimental and timeless testament. This dull looking metal slab, with whatever special words you chose, could in theory endure longer than anything else on earth.

If, tomorrow, an asteroid fell and melted the earth's crust and along with it every living and inanimate thing, including your metal creation, your love letter or recipe might not be lost forever like the oceans and the trees. The earth would be barren but as it cooled your melted creation would slowly re-form itself, slowly hardening into the shape of a slab, and slowly the words that you had carved would come back together, and your piece of metal would sit atop a lifeless rocky expanse, so that the last proof of man would be your love letter or recipe for pineapple upside-down cake. The only hint of man on earth would be your little metal slab, because once 55-Nitinol is given a shape it will always return to that shape. When it is heated in the proper manner, it will retain the memory of the shape it is given.

For more information see this old NASA report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12702945/55Nitinol-The-Alloy-with-a-Memory-NASA-Report

Beaches

I remember being little and hearing Carl Sagan give an opening monologue in an episode of Cosmos. In his monologue he stood on a beach at sunset and the camera came closer to him and focused on his hand. In his hand he held a palm full of sand and he said, "There are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world."

Sagan sputtered off some numbers which I do not remember. But I will always remember that statistic, because it seemed so amazing to me. I am struck by the vastness of that number.

Now science theorizes that the number of universes that exist exceeds the number of all the grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world. There may be an infinite number of universes.

Recently I've had an even more amazing thought. This idea requires a small re-evaluation of scale to become truly beautiful.

Imagine how many grains of sand there are on all the beaches on all of the planets circling all of the stars in all of the universes?

You might say, well, that sounds boring--I don't like sand. But, if you have ever seen a photograph of sand under magnification, you might start to think that sand is more beautiful than stars almost. I think it comes close.