The naturalist John Muir said the two greatest experiences of his life were camping with Ralph Waldo Emerson at Yosemite and finding the rare orchid calypso blooming alone in a Canadian swamp. Last spring I found a wild orchid as exceptional as a night with Emerson: a white lady-slipper, solitary, snow-pure, alone in a pine woods with 10,000 of its pink cousins. My Peterson wildflower guide admits the white variant of the lady-slipper and calls it rare and local. Rare and local, indeed! In my part of New England I have never seen another.
Cosmology
White lady's-slipper • Photo by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes / USFWS (Public Domain)
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
Not with a bang but a laugh
A creation myth from the ancient Mediterranean has God bring all things into being with seven laughs. Here is how Charles Doria and Harris Lenowitz translate the first laugh: Light (Flash) / showed up / All splitter / born universe god / fire god. Those lines are two thousand years old, but they aptly describe the modern scientific view of Creation.
Artist's rendering of a quasar • ESO/M. Kornmesser (CC BY 4.0)
Looking back to the beginning
In the beginning there was light. That is the conclusion of physicists who have attempted to reconstruct theoretically the first moments of the Universe.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Feeling at home in the Milky Way
On the night of an August meteor shower, my son and I slept under the open sky. It was a night of exceptional clarity, far from the lights and haze of Boston. Meteors flashed against a background of stars so numerous the heavens seemed more light than dark.