Nothingness

The right distractions boost creativity.

An amputation guide for surgeons from 1739The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library For amputees, it’s adding insult to injury. They’ve already lost pieces of themselves that they thought they could always count on, limbs that they first discovered while waving the chubby things in their cribs. Yet after that life-changing loss comes a new kind of suffering: […]

To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head.

We think of our future selves as strangers.

Michael Lucid photographs samples found during the Multispecies Baseline Initiative (MBI).Ben Goldfarb In 2010, Michael Lucid, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game, captured a surprise in a beer-baited gastropod trap—a slug that didn’t genetically resemble any of the ones he’d caught before. On a hunch, Lucid sent the mysterious invertebrate to […]

Moles don’t see, whales can’t smell, and snakes can’t hear a thing.

Still Life with Gastric PeptideMia Brownell My grandfather wasn’t a big farmer, but his small garden in Kentucky was a miracle. There was rhubarb, corn, and peppers a-plenty, but mostly I remember the tomatoes. He bred his own, saving the seeds of the best specimens every year. By the time he was getting well into […]

Aristotle filled the void with an invisible ether, Torricelli killed it, and Higgs has gone some way to bringing it back. The will to nothingness is the path away from meaning for Nietzsche, but the path toward meaning for the Buddhist. Some formalist approaches to mathematics define zero as a foundational symbol, while Gödel used […]

We can experience nothingness, but does it actually exist?

A child asks, and war answers.