On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.

There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognizable etching from a forgotten past.

When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliché, but true, to say that you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.

But that’s also true for your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, stretching back millennia. Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a saber-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of chimpanzees more than 6 million years ago.

Trace the human lineage back hundreds of millions of years and all our fates hinge on a single wormlike creature that, thankfully for us, avoided being squished. If those precise chains of creatures and couples hadn’t survived, lived, and loved just the way that they did, other people might exist, but you wouldn’t. We are the surviving barbs of a chain-link past, and if that past had been even marginally different, we would not be here.

The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.

When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.

Amor fati means accepting that truth, even embracing it, recognizing that we are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past, and that the triumphs and the tragedies of the lives that came before us are the reason we’re here. We owe our existences to kindness and cruelty, good and evil, love and hate. It can’t be otherwise because, if it were, we would not be us.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins once observed. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” These are the limitless possible futures, full of possible people, that Dawkins called “unborn ghosts.”

Their ranks are infinite; we are finite. With the tiniest adjustments, different people would be born, leading different lives, in a different world. Our existence is bewilderingly fragile, built upon the shakiest of foundations.

Why do we pretend otherwise? These basic truths about the fragility of our existence defy our most deeply held intuitions about how the world works. We instinctively believe that big events have big, straightforward causes, not small, accidental ones. As a social scientist, that’s what I was taught to search for: the X that causes Y.

I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.

But I also began to flirt with an alluring thought: that we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality, by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes, spit out by a universe that can’t be tamed.

Such intellectual heresy ran against everything I had been taught, from Sunday school to grad school. Everything happens for a reason; you just need to find out what it is. If you want to understand social change, just read more history books and social science papers. To learn the story of our species and how we came to be us, dive into some biology and familiarize yourself with Darwin. To grapple with the unknowable mysteries of life, spend time with the titans of philosophy, or if you’re a believer, turn to religion. And if you want to understand the intricate mechanisms of the universe, learn physics.

But what if such enduring human mysteries are all part of the same big question?

Specifically, it’s the biggest puzzle humanity must grapple with: Why do things happen? The more I read, year after year, the more I realized that there are no ready-made solutions to that enormous puzzle just waiting to be plucked from political science theories, philosophy tomes, economic equations, evolutionary biology studies, geology research, anthropology articles, physics proofs, psychology experiments, or neuroscience lectures.

Instead, I began to recognize that each of these disparate realms of human knowledge offers a piece that, when combined, can help us get closer to solving this bewildering puzzle. The challenge of my new book, Fluke, is to try to join many of those pieces together, to yield a new, coherent picture that reframes our sense of who we are and how our world works.

When enough puzzle pieces snap together, a fresh image emerges. As we see it come into focus, there’s hope that we can replace the comforting lies we tell ourselves with something that approaches a more accurate truth, even if it means that we must flip our entire, deeply ingrained worldview on its head.

A fair warning: some of you may find that flip disorienting. But we already live in disorienting times—of conspiratorial politics and pandemics, economic shocks, climate change, and fresh society-bending magic, produced by the wizardry of artificial intelligence. In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But when lost at sea, clinging to comforting lies will only help us sink. The best life raft may just be the truth.

We live in a more interesting and complex world than we are led to believe. If we gaze a little closer, then the storybook reality of neat, tidy connections might just give way to a reality defined much more by chance and chaos, an arbitrarily intertwined world in which every moment, no matter how small, can count.

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Adapted from Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas. Copyright © 2024. Available from Simon & Schuster.

Nature discovered only one method of producing and arranging living matter. There is, however, another, simpler, more malleable, and quicker method, one that nature has never made use of. This other method, which also has the potential to develop life, is the one I discovered today.

Any scientist, especially one who works in the artificial life field, would love to make such a groundbreaking discovery, to be the first in the world to share these wonderful words on social media and publish the results in prestigious scientific journals. Unfortunately, another method to create life has not yet been found, and these notes were written in a laboratory book by the fictional mad scientist Rossum from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., subtitled Rossum’s Universal Robots.

Karel Čapek (January 9, 1890–December 25, 1938) was a Czechoslovak writer, playwright, and journalist. I don’t believe he ever had an ambition to be one of the “firsts” in the world, but in the end he was. With his brother Josef he invented a new word—robot—and he was the first to use this word for an artificial human, formed from chemically synthesized living matter.

In Czech, R.U.R. was published in November 1920 and premiered on January 25, 1921 in the National Theatre in Prague. The play was first performed in English by the New York Theatre Guild on October 9, 1922. It was a great success—by 1923 R.U.R. had been translated into thirty languages. And the word “robot” remained untranslated in most of these.

Soon the word “robot” started to be used for all sorts of things, and Karel Čapek, instead of being happy at its fame, was upset and frustrated. He protested against the idea of robots in the form of electromechanical monsters that fly airplanes or destroy the world by trampling. His robots were not made of sheet metal and cogwheels; they were not a celebration of mechanical engineering!

In a column in the newspaper Lidové noviny in June 1935, he emphasized that when writing R.U.R. he was thinking instead of modern chemistry. Although it was the chemistry of the time, without concepts like DNA or RNA, his statements were quite timeless (as is all of R.U.R.). He laid stress on the idea that one day we will be able to produce, by artificial means, a living cell in a test tube.

That we will be able to create a new kind of matter by chemical synthesis, one that behaves like living material; an organic substance, different from what living cells are made of; something like an alternative basis for life, a material substrate in which life could have evolved, had it not, from the beginning, taken the path it did. He emphasized that we do not have to suppose that all the different possibilities of creation have been exhausted on our planet. His texts were such a brilliant ode to artificial life!

However, in Čapek’s lifetime there was no developed scientific field of artificial life (commonly abbreviated as ALife). This emerged several decades later. It is generally accepted that the modern field of ALife was established at a workshop held in Los Alamos in 1987 by Christopher G. Langton. The field focuses mainly on the creation of synthetic life on computers or in the laboratory, in order to study, simulate, and understand living systems.

Originally the field was a conglomerate of researchers from various disciplines including computer science, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and philosophy, who were exploring topics and issues far outside of their own disciplines’ mainstreams, often topics of foundational and interdisciplinary character. These “renegade” scientists had problems finding colleagues, conferences, and journals in which to disseminate their research and to exchange ideas.

For this rich and diverse set of people, ALife became a new home, a “big tent,” unifying them especially in two main conferences (the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, and later also the European Conference on Artificial Life, with meetings in alternating years) and one scientific journal (MIT Press’s Artificial Life).

Today, artificial life researchers meet annually at conferences simply titled ALife. I have attended many of them, and always it thrills me to see what kinds of topics are presented and how many views on a specific problem are offered during the discussions. The common characteristic of all researchers in the ALife community is their open mind. It really is a radically interdisciplinary field that cannot be defined either as pure science or engineering. It involves both, employing experimental and theoretical approaches, and the research is fundamental and mainly curiosity-driven.

Practical applications come as by-products, but they are not the goal. There are so many basic questions that we are still unable to answer, such as “What is life?”, “How did life originate?,” “What is consciousness?” and more. Many of these questions are related not only to science but also to philosophy. And what has always fascinated me most was how many of these contemporary questions were already heard in Čapek’s century-old science fiction play.

And therefore I often introduced and praised Čapek’s R.U.R. in my talks at conferences, but also in scientific papers, in normal conversation, everywhere! Not only because I wanted to call attention to all of the fascinating open questions related to artificial life that Čapek outlined, but also to point out that the original robots were made from artificial flesh and bones, which was always surprising information for many people.

Moreover, I wanted to remind the world of the Czech giant, Karel Čapek, who was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in literature. Of course, I also like his other works. Since childhood I have loved his books Nine Fairy Tales and Dashenka, or the Life of a Puppy. Later I read The Makropulos Affair, The Mother, The White Disease, War with the Newts, Krakatit, The Gardener’s Year, and others.

Some of these works also raise issues related to artificial life (especially War with the Newts), but Rossum’s Universal Robots has become my favorite since I started my doctoral studies in the Chemical Robotics Laboratory of Professor František Štěpánek at my alma mater, the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague.

In fact, the chemical robots in the form of microparticles that we designed and investigated, and that had properties similar to living cells, were much closer to Čapek’s original ideas than any other robots today (“a blob of some colloidal pulp that not even a dog would eat,” as one of his characters puts it).

Currently, in my laboratory I examine droplets of decanol in the environment of sodium decanoate (an organic phase almost immiscible with water in the form of a droplet located on the surface of an aqueous surfactant solution). These droplets are unique in that they somehow resemble the behavior of living organisms.

For example, just as living cells or small animals can move in an oriented manner in an environment of chemical substances—in other words, they can move chemotactically (chase food or run away from poisonous substances)—so my droplets can follow the addition of salts or hydroxides in a very similar way. Thanks to chemotaxis, they can even find their way out of a maze!

Just as living cells change their shape and create various protrusions on their surface, so also decanol droplets are able to change their shape under certain conditions and create all kinds of tentacle-like structures. We also recently discovered that amazing interactions occur in groups of many droplets, when the droplets cluster or, on the contrary, repel each other, so that their dance creations on glass slides or in Petri dishes resemble the collective behavior of animal populations like flocks.

Bottom line, I started to call these droplets liquid robots! Just as Rossum’s robots were artificial human beings that only looked like humans and could imitate only certain characteristics and behaviors of humans, so liquid robots, as artificial cells, only partially imitate the behavior of their living counterparts.

As I mentioned above, R.U.R. was published in 1920. As the year 2020 approached, I felt that we must mark the centenary of this timeless work and celebrate the word “robot” in some way. Some of my ideas were never realized, and some were only partially realized due to the COVID pandemic (we organized the ALife 2021 conference as an online-only event, rather than hosting it in Prague as we wanted). The project I really took seriously was to prepare a book on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the word “robot.” This book would contain Čapek’s original play along with present-day views on this century-old story.

And thus the book Robot 100: Sto rozumů was released by our University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in November 2020, exactly 100 years after Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. It contained the contributions of 100 people, mostly scientists, but also writers, journalists, radio and television presenters, musicians, athletes, and artists. R.U.R. is a timeless work, in which we can find many topics that scientists deal with even today, whether the synthesis of artificial cells, tissues, and organs, issues of evolution and reproduction, or the ability to imitate the behavior of human beings and show at least signs of intelligence or consciousness.

R.U.R. also outlines social problems related to globalization, the distribution of power and wealth, religion, and the position of women in society. Every contributor could find an example of how R.U.R. raises some still unanswered questions of their field.

The feedback of readers and the positive reviews encouraged me to publish an English edition. I was pleased that the MIT Press was interested in publishing my book. The key problem, as I had already seen in feedback from contributors, was the English translations of Čapek’s play. Probably the most widely used English translation of R.U.R. is the very first one from 1923 by Paul Selver.

However, it is not a very successful translation, and Čapek himself was not satisfied with it. Not only did Selver leave out some passages, but he even completely canceled the character of the robot Damon. Also, while Čapek’s original consists of a prologue and three acts, in translations we often encounter three acts and a final epilogue. Foreign authors often wrote about Rossum junior as a son because he is referred to as “young Rossum,” but in the Czech original it is clearly stated that he was the nephew of the older Rossum.

Another difference was Domin’s request for Helena Glory’s hand—while in the Czech original he only places both hands on her shoulders, in Selver’s translation he even kisses her. Inconsistencies in the translations were mostly easily solvable trifles, but sometimes they complicated the content of the entire essay.

It was clear that if we published Robot 100 in English, it would require a completely new translation. I am happy that Professor Štěpán Šimek agreed to translate the first edition of Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. I was so happy when I obtained his comments to the translation: “This is a straight translation in terms of the original. By that I mean, that unlike some other translations that I’m familiar with, I have not made any cuts, that I have translated every word and line, and that I haven’t changed anything from the original. While the play has some obvious dramaturgical flaws, I have not tried to correct those in the translation. I believe that cuts, rearrangements, dramaturgical clarifications, and stuff like that are the job of the potential director and/or dramaturg, not the translator, unless the translator is asked to create an adaptation of the original. In other words, this is a Translation, not an Adaptation.”

And I was amazed when I read the new translation. It is excellent and it fulfills my expectations. Thanks to Štěpán Šimek’s work, this book offers English-speaking readers a truly faithful translation of Čapek’s R.U.R.

It was obvious that if we published book Robot 100 in English in 2023, it would require a new title, because there is no centenary this year. We also decided not to include the contributions of all one hundred of the contributing authors in our print edition, but to select mainly those related to artificial life, and to publish the rest online.

Finally, we have chosen the title R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life. This title perfectly reflects what the readers will find within—the century-old play R.U.R in a completely new and modern translation by Štěpán Šimek, and twenty essays on how Čapek’s brilliant play has the prescient power to illustrate current directions and issues in artificial life research and beyond.

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From R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life by Karel Čapek, edited by Jitka Čejková. Copyright © 2024. Available from MIT Press.

If we were to trace the lineage of our existence, how far would we go? Would we venture countless years beyond our first humanoid ancestors? How deep into the earth’s life would we be willing to travel, and what insights would emerge from such an exploration?

Engaging with the words of the American essayist Lewis Thomas is no simple task. To step into his universe is to shed preconceived notions of ourselves, our existence and our world and be prepared to confront more questions than answers as we come out on the other side.

“I go back, and so do you, like it or not, to a single Ur-ancestor,” Thomas writes in his book The Fragile Species, “whose remains are on display in rocks dated approximately 3.7 thousand million years ago, born a billion or so years after the Earth itself took shape and began cooling down. That first of the line, our n-granduncle, was unmistakably a bacterial cell.” This idea—that we come from very modest beginnings—appears throughout his writing to remind us over and over that humans, like all animals, plants, even bacteria, are related, having emerged from one cell in the primeval seas.

Thomas began his writing career in earnest in the early 1970s, carving a special place for himself in the golden era of contemplation in this speculative and inquiring manner. After or alongside other thinkers of the time—Buckminster Fuller, Peter Singer, Robert Ornstein and Gregory Bateson—Thomas, too, was driven by utopian ideals of perfection, tempered by humane concerns with vulnerability. He was a biologist, immunologist and pathologist of great repute and would later come to also be known as a writer of great repute.

He set out to demystify the seemingly arcane world of science with the magic wand of poetic utterance. Having lived through two World Wars and a Cold War, he must have thought the worst was behind him. “Get us through the next few years… safely out of this century…and then watch what we can do,” he wrote. But here we are, well into the 21st century, caught between digital isolation and demagogic collectivism, on the verge of a looming threat of war and climate breakdown.

A seemingly paradoxical coupling of anxiety and hope is the cornerstone of Thomas’s writing: the former a catalyst for the latter. Today, it is this sense of hope and optimism that can light our future path. So too can his consistent message that humans must inevitably coexist, mirroring the interconnected nature of all species on Earth. Some of the science may now feel outdated, but his writing remains a valuable resource for understanding the human adventure and what we may yet need to do to correct course if we want to survive and survive well.

*

Science and humanities are not separate entities, as we are made to believe. Both are an exploration of what makes us human, even though they may take circuitous paths to arrive at the same questions. Thomas, the ‘Poet Laureate of 20th Century Medical Science’ (1989 Albert Lasker Public Service Award citation) seamlessly fused both realms. “Thomas was as likely in print as on the wards to pair epiphany (à la James Joyce) with entropy (à la the second law of thermo-dynamics, or ∆ S > q/T)” wrote his contemporary, Gerald Weissman, a scientist and writer himself. Thomas, according to Weissman, was convinced that medicine was like grammar, “a hybrid of science and art united by syntax.”

Thomas’ literary career began in 1970 after he delivered the keynote address at a conference on inflammation held in Brook Lodge, Michigan. The talk was scintillating and devoid of the often dense and dull voice that permeates academic spaces; characterized instead by elegant and witty prose—a style that would later define him.

Thomas’s speech was published as a pamphlet and soon after, his old friend, Franz Ingelfinger, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, invited him to write a monthly column “in the same general style”. The terms were attractive: one essay a month on any topic. He would not be paid but was promised that nobody would edit his writing.

This was just a few years after the iconic photograph of Earth rising on the horizon above the moon’s surface captivated the world’s imagination. Much like the way the image permanently altered people’s perspective of our home planet, Thomas’s column ‘Notes of a Biology Watcher’ also elevated readers’ consciousness regarding our place in the vast expanse of the universe.

At the time of Ingelfinger’s offer, Thomas had published about 200 academic papers and some “occasional light verse.” “Good bad verse was what I was pretty good at,” he wrote in his memoir. Eventually, he would go on to publish five essay collections (The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher; The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher; Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; Et Cetera Et Cetera: Notes of a Word Watcher and The Fragile Species), a memoir (The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher) and a slim collection of poetry (Could I Ask You Something?).

At first, Thomas wrote, by his own admission, “several dreadful essays which I could not bring myself to read.” So, he ditched his initial method of grouping thoughts in a sequential order. Instead, he took to writing fast and freely at night, sometimes after deadline, without outline, form, or method. Within six months, he published six essays on cells, moon germs, symbiosis, and his beloved planet Earth. They received widespread admiration and support for their brevity, accessibility and quiet wisdom, even as he himself viewed his writing as “writing for fun.”

Thomas opens his very first essay “The Lives of a Cell”—later the title of his collection of essays which would win the National Book Prize—meditating on humans as transitory beings and the need for interconnectedness, the leitmotifs of his oeuvre. “We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet.

In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds. But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia…Man is embedded in nature.”

And because man is embedded in nature, he must engage in dynamic self-organizing systems and natural world symbiosis. “We are not the masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of life as are the leaves or midges or fish… the earth is a loosely formed, spherical organism, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.”

While Thomas’ writing quickly rose to acclaim in the scientific and medical community, it was a letter he received—“the nicest letter”—from the writer Joyce Carol Oates that shone a light on him as a substantial literary figure. Oates circulated Thomas’ writing among students to teach the “art of the essay.” She taught his theories “not because they sound revolutionary, but because they are new, novel and seemingly objective explications of what has always been known, though expressed in different terms,” she later wrote in the New York Times.

Inspired by his hero Montaigne, Thomas was a master of the literary essay. No metaphor was out of reach for him, no connection too wild. The sky, for instance, is a “gleaming membrane,” elsewhere it is a “wide-open country, irresistible for exploration;” the earth is “most like a single cell;” language, once it comes alive, “behaves like an active, motile organism;” and an active field of science is like “an immense intellectual anthill; the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tumbling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing it around at the speed of light.”

*

Born on the cusp of the First World War in 1913 in Flushing, New York, to a father who was a surgeon and family doctor and mother a trained nurse, Thomas grew up saturated in the world of science and medicine. All through his childhood, he accompanied his father on house calls. This was the early 20th century, when a medical professional’s job was mostly to comfort the ill and the dying, not to change the course of their illnesses.

From his father he learnt that most illnesses tended to kill some patients and spare others, and if the one spared had a doctor by their side, the patient became convinced the doctor “saved” them. In his memoir, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, Thomas recalls his father telling him he should be careful never to believe this of himself were he to take up the profession.

Perhaps it is why he wore his erudition lightly and sprinkled it with wit and humour. He never claimed to know all the answers as he invited his readers to stretch their understanding of mysterious events, right from within the tiny nucleus of an atom, all the way to the ungraspable surprises of the distant cosmos.

To read a Lewis Thomas essay is to watch fireworks light up a dark night. Take for instance his essay whimsically titled “Comprehending my Cat Jeoffry.” He begins with a meditation on how the more we learn about nature, “the more we seem to distance ourselves from the rest of life, as though we were separate creatures, so different from other irrelevant occupants of the biosphere as to have arrived from another galaxy.”

Swiftly, he shifts his mind to the etymology of the word “nature” rooted in the Indo-European language of perhaps 35,000 years ago, moving to the Greek and Latin, and wondering how the long memory of such a word could lose its meaning. He then makes an astonishing leap: “What is going on in the minds of… our nonhuman relatives in the biosphere?” From there, he reflects on bacteria, antibiotics, the defensive maneuvers of certain cricket and moth species to evade bats. Finally, he comes to his protagonist—“a small Abyssinian cat, a creature of elegance, grace, and poise, a piece of moving sculpture, and a total mystery.”

Brimming with wonder, he then delivers a most feline sentence about his feline friend: “Just as he is able to hear sounds that I cannot hear, and smell important things of which I am unaware, and suddenly leap like a crazed gymnast from chair to chair, upstairs and downstairs through the house, flawless in every movement and searching for something he never finds, he has periods of long meditation on matters that I know nothing about.”

The allure of Thomas’ writing lies in the philosophical dimension he weaves into the fabric of scientific inquiry. Consider this, a possible nod to the Ship of Theseus thought experiment: “There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again.”

*

Optimism can come across as twee if overdone. But in Thomas’ hands it is a stethoscope with which he probes the human condition unfolding in the theatre of a grand production. He is not ignorant of the “aggression, grabbiness and terrorism” in nature; he just chooses to highlight the synergy and co-operation instead.

Insects to him are not merely parasites or spreaders of disease or afflictions. They are “indispensable sources of food for aerial and aquatic life, carriers of heredity for plants and technical assistants in the recycling of forest life.” Microbes are friendly and amiable. “We are symbionts, my mitochondria and I, bound together for the advance of the biosphere, living together in harmony, maybe even affection. For sure, I am fond of my microbial engines, and I assume they are pleased by the work they do for me.”

Equally a proponent of altruism in nature, Thomas invites us to take inspiration from ants, bees and termites in how they live as a homogenous unit in their hives, nests and termitaria. The novelist John Updike scoffed at this very “altruistic view of nature” but admired his “shimmering vision of hope.”

Thomas saw us humans a “fragile species, still new to the earth here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured,” therefore still finding our way. Towards the end of his life, however, Thomas’ Panglossian optimism did seem to falter. He became haunted by the seemingly limitless ability of man to self-destruct, and destruct others in thermo-nuclear warfare. Even though trillions of other species before us lived in collaboration, he wrote that humans were the “anomalies of the moment, the self-conscious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our place, unwilling to join up.”

Long before the term Anthropocene was popularized, he defined it lucidly: “We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a new growth over the entire surface, touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves. The earth risks being eutrophied by us. We are now the dominant feature of our own environment.”

For a moment, he even yielded to the temptation of believing that our maturity as a species had peaked, putting us at the risk of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, “radioactive at that.” This could be reversed, he seemed to say, if we let go of our arrogance, and accepted that our existence on earth was a mere accident, a consequence of “pure luck, indeterminate and intentionless,” that there would always exist “imponderable puzzles of cosmology,” that had it not been for one DNA mutation after another paving the way to our current state, “we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

*

What if we took a moment to look at the earth from the moon, as only a handful before us have done? What if we stretched the moment to encompass geological time? The seas would not always be seas, the mountains not always mountains. We would see giant land masses, slowly drifting away from each other on their crustal plates to form continents. Like most of the planetary inhabitants, humans would appear and vanish in the blink of an eye. And then, facing the immensity of that which we cannot grasp, we would perhaps acknowledge our place in the world.

If lucky, we might also glimpse Thomas’ vision of the world: “Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development…the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.”

When my son was almost two years old, we went to the office holiday party at NPR, where I work. He was happily eating cookies in a cafeteria crowded with revelers when Santa Claus burst into the room with a mighty HO HO HO. It was one of my colleagues (sadly, I can’t remember who), dressed up in a red suit and fake white beard, who greeted every child and boomed, “Have you been good this year?” My son watched him, wary. When Santa came over to us, my son cringed and hid behind my legs, looking as though he might cry. Santa held out a candy cane. My son refused to take it.

I admired the kid. Faced with an intrusive, looming, bizarrely-dressed stranger, he ignored social pressure and outright bribery in favor of his own assessment of the disturbing observable facts. Part of me regretted that I wasn’t going to have an adorable photo of him on Santa’s lap to send to his grandparents. But as a science reporter, I was fascinated to watch my children investigate the strange phenomenon that is Saint Nick.

One night, when my son was about three, we were curled up in bed, reading “The Night Before Christmas.” Together, my son and I gazed at the picture in the book, a richly detailed rendering of reindeer with golden harnesses, pulling a tiny sleigh above snowy rooftops.

“Can reindeer really fly?” he asked.

“What do you think about that?” I asked.

“No!” he answered, immediately and decisively.

“I’ve never seen a flying deer,” I said casually, “but I love this illustration. I think it’s beautiful.”

I’d chosen my words carefully. Parents, armed with pronouncements from pop psychologists, have long traded tedious, judgmental barbs about the best way to handle Santa-related queries. It’s always “You’re lying to children and betraying their trust!” versus “You’re depriving children of magic and joy!” To me, though, fielding questions about Santa seemed like just one more task in my most difficult but essential duty as a parent: demonstrating how to walk a tightrope of honesty without falling into despair.

Compared to the abundance of stories and movies and songs about Santa, which bombard children all December long, the scientific literature on Santa, and especially on how this ubiquitous myth is perceived by young minds, is regrettably scant. Occasionally a medical journal will run a faux-serious article such as “Work-related skin diseases of Santa Claus” or “Santa Claus: A Global Health Threat.”

And some physicists have playfully used Einstein’s theory of relativity to account for Santa’s impressive feats through time and space—if Santa moves fast enough, clocks will slow down, allowing him to visit billions of homes in just one night, and his body will shrink, letting him slip down chimneys.

Children, whose knowledge of physics is less esoteric but nonetheless robust, conduct their own analyses. “Santa is purported to engage in activities that violate physical principles known even to infants,” researchers wrote in one study. They noted that kids may initially accept trusted adults’ testimony about Santa’s fabulous abilities, despite any inward doubts.

But as children develop a more mature understanding of what’s physically possible, their questions become increasingly pointed. While the very young tend to ask for factual details about Santa (“Where does he live?”), older kids are more likely to ask for explanations of his superhuman traits (“How can he watch everyone to see if they’re bad or good?”)

Most children know the truth by the age of seven or so. In 1994, one child psychiatry journal featured a study that claimed to be the first investigation of how both children and their parents reacted to this “ultimately inescapable encounter with reality.” Only a third of the kids in this study got the straight dope about Santa from their parents. More than half of the children figured out that he was fictional on their own. While the kids reported a range of emotions about this discovery, most often they felt “surprised,” “happy,” “good,” and “relieved.”

Their parents, by contrast, most commonly reported feeling “sadness.” Some parents told the researchers that Christmas felt less magical. Those parents were probably disappointed to see their precious cuties growing up and losing their much-ballyhooed “childlike sense of wonder.”

That phrase has never made sense to me. I question how much wonder children actually feel. My own young kids approached everything from a moving walkway to dog drool to Santa Claus with a matter-of-fact inquisitiveness that any scientist would recognize and respect. A toddler’s instinct, upon encountering something unfamiliar, is not to revel in awe; a baby will, without hesitation, grab the closest novel thing, wave it in the air, smash it on the ground, suck on it, tear it apart—in short, try to figure it out.

I remember my daughter as a preschooler, pointing to someone in a Santa-suit on a street corner. “Is that Santa?” she asked.

“That is a person dressed up as Santa,” I answered. “Playing Santa is like a big game that people enjoy this time of year because winter is cold and dark and it’s good to have something fun that we can all do together.”

I never misled my children, but I noticed that whenever I acknowledged Santa’s non-existence, I felt compelled to tack on some kind of spiritual consolation prize, like the beauty of art or the comfort of fellowship. It’s as if I worried that by just baldly stating “Santa is a made-up story,” I’d be leaving the children unprotected against, well, their “ultimately inescapable encounter with reality,” as those psychology researchers put it, in a word construction that sounds an awful lot like a euphemism for death.

Maybe it’s this unconscious urge to protect children—and ourselves—that accounts for the popularity of the Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus editorial by newspaperman Frank Church. In 1897, after a girl wrote to his paper and begged to know whether Santa was real, Church famously replied that Santa existed “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

Who can object to that metaphorical delight? But Church then went on to seemingly diss science and reason. In this great universe, he wrote, the intelligence of humans approximated that of mere ants, incapable of grasping the unseen world: “Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there.” He wrote that without “childlike faith” in Santa Claus—and, I presume, another often-bearded supernatural being associated with this holiday—our existence would be intolerably dreary.

Personally, the only childlike faith that I value is children’s innate, irrepressible conviction in their own ability to puzzle things out. Remember, psychologists found that children felt pretty good after finally cracking the Santa case. The pursuit of rational understanding isn’t dreary; it’s beautiful and fun, suffused with creativity and hope. A child seeking the truth about Santa is much like a researcher investigating a massive black hole or unexpected chemical reaction or some alien creature that flickers with bioluminescence in the dark ocean depths.

I’ve seen photos of myself as a little girl perched on Santa’s knee, but I have no memories of how I perceived that experience. “When I was a kid, did you try to get me to believe in Santa?” I recently asked my parents. My father, a mathematician, scoffed. “Of course not,” he said. “We told you he was a mythological being that represented generosity and good cheer.”

Still, every December, my mother hung stockings above the chimney with care. And every Christmas Eve, she made sure cookies were left on a festively decorated plate, as though she truly believed St. Nick would soon be there.

These days, my daughter helps her set them out, along with a glass of chocolate milk. On Christmas morning, the cookies will be nibbled and the glass empty, and my children will gleefully open presents labeled: “From Santa.” Fully cognizant that Santa does not exist, they will exclaim “Wow, thanks, Santa!” and “Look what Santa gave me!” as my parents and I smile behind our cups of coffee, feigning surprise and interest in the gifts apparently delivered by that right jolly old elf.

The other day I asked my daughter, who is now ten, “Did you ever believe that Santa was real?”

“What are you talking about?” she said, deadpan, not even looking up from the book she was reading. “Of course Santa is real.”

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Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life by Nell Greenfieldboyce is available now via W. W. Norton & Company. 

I have so many photos of it. Bougainvillea draping over walls next to cobbled streets, bougainvillea in pots running wild over the iron grills of restaurants, bougainvillea bonsai in a rock garden. They are hardy, flowering even in near-droughts. They come in an array of lollipop colors, from golden yellow to magenta. They fit into any context, somehow managing to look as if they have always belonged here. Cobbled street in Rome? Sure. Beachside balcony in Miami? Why not. Riverfront in Lisbon? No problem.

I remember my mental muscles twitching the first time I learned that the papery petals of the bougainvillea are actually not flowers; they are leaves. We lived then in a small house, rented from a family friend. The neighbors on both sides were wealthy and their houses had gardens, and the households had stay-at-home mothers and servants to water the plants. As a result, a luxuriant bough of bougainvillea clambered over one tall wall and spilled over into the thin mud corridor between our house and their wall. I thought of it as our bougainvillea and felt even then the grace of this plant, climbing over walls, bridging social chasms, bringing its beauty to people who had done nothing to deserve it.

It was my aunt, an agricultural scientist, who told me that the bougainvillea flowers as I thought of them were not flowers, that they were leaves. The scientific term is bract—a modified leaf that often hides the real flower in its axil. Bougainvillea bracts come in extraordinary colors, from shades of pink that go from the lightest of blushes to extravagant fuchsias. There are crinkly yellows that remind me of crumpled first drafts and oranges and saffrons and whites, often brilliant against the lush green leafery that surrounds them. “These bracts are actually protecting the real flowers, by pretending to be flowers,” my aunt told me, teasing out the tiny white flower hiding inside a cluster of bougainvillea bracts.

My parents eventually built a house of their own. By the time they finished the house, we children had left home. After years of living in a house that was too small, my parents now live alone in a house that is too big for them. My mother, whose bank-clerk salary was the only source of income for most of our childhood, started gardening, turning her practical maternal attention to green peppers and curry leaves and aloe vera. “I am not interested in flowers,” she would say, frugally choosing “useful plants” to make the most of her small yard. But then the bougainvillea bug bit her.

One year when I came home from Brooklyn, there was a row of pots on the wall, with bougainvilleas in different colors spilling out of them. It was my job that summer to water them carefully. Bougainvillea roots are famously weak—they are climbers, so they do not have to support their own weight. What they have instead is a strong grip—using their thorns, they wind their way up or down, making a home for themselves on hedges, walls, other trees, making themselves both ordinary and spectacular at the same time. They reminded me of the way I, too, was clawing my way up the walls of another country, while my roots shallowed in the ground.

And so I started reading about them. Bougainvilleas are named after the eighteenth-century French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who led a voyage of circumnavigation around the world. His expedition was part of the race between the British and the French to make new discoveries in the South Pacific. Bougainville’s expedition was the first one to include a government-sponsored naturalist on board, Philibert Commerçon.

The expedition arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1767, where Commerçon noticed trees with bright mauve and magenta bracts. He named this new genus Bougainvillea, in honor of the expedition leader. Commerçon is said to have collected at least five specimens of this then-unusual plant in Rio de Janeiro—today these specimens can be seen in various herbariums in France.

But was it really Commerçon who noticed these plants first? Commerçon was not a man in robust health; he would go on to die in Madagascar during the same expedition. On board, he was accompanied by an assistant who also happened to be an expert botanist. There is some speculation that this assistant was his lover, a woman who had disguised herself as a man to fit into the masculine atmosphere of the ship.

According to Glynis Ridley’s The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, it was Baret who first noticed and described this plant—and perhaps most of the six thousand-odd natural specimens that the expedition collected—many of these named for Commerçon or Bougainville. In Ridley’s telling, Baret went looking for medicinal plants in the forest of Rio de Janeiro because Commerçon was sick, and she was drawn to the red bracts of the bougainvillea because of the doctrine of signatures, according to which the shapes and colors of plants can reveal their uses.

The very next year, Captain Cook and his Endeavour expedition would arrive in Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese rulers had grown even more suspicious. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on board, and his team were not allowed to disembark, but according to their diaries, they managed to outwit the sentinels and sneak out at night by boat. The Endeavour returned to London with various plant specimens and the first recorded sketch of a bougainvillea—a finished watercolor that is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum of London.

And thus the bougainvillea was discovered and described and identified. But of course, it was neither Commerçon nor Baret who discovered the bougainvillea. The flower is native to the countries we now know as Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It is interesting that even though Glynis Ridley is alive to the unfairness by which Jeanne Baret is sidelined from bougainvillea history, she does not inquire into the lopsidedness of colonial explorers getting to name plants after themselves without seeking to find their local names or understand their local contexts. The words discovered or described or identified suggest a foreign audience for these actions—the locals did not need to perform any of these elaborate epistemological tasks.

People of color often use air quotes when we talk of explorers who “discovered” the Americas or India. Alas, it is hard to translate air quotes to text. My fingers ache often to somehow include the eye-rolling with which we accompany air quotes. I propose instead a new word: pseudiscovery. The silent p, I hope, will convey the silence of our air quotes, the people and places who were rendered invisible when Europeans pseudiscovered them.

Today the bougainvillea is the cliché flower you expect to see in cute colonial towns. It is known as Santa Rita in Uruguay, trinitaria in Mexico, jahanamiya in Arabic, bunga kertas in Indonesia. I love also all the vernacular variations of bougainvillea, the pronunciations catching the local accents—from bowgainvilla in my own Malayalam to bumbagilia in Spanish.

But before the bougainvillea was pseudiscovered and grown in the herbariums of France and propagated in the gardens of England, before it was transplanted into tropical colonies around the world by the British, French, and Portuguese, before it acquired all these different names, it must have had a name. What is the bougainvillea called in the Tupian languages, many of them now extinct, spoken in the Andean region when Commerçon and Cook arrived? It must have been called something else. Or rather, it was something else. In other words, the bougainvillea is not a bougainvillea just as its flower is not a flower.

*

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about coming across the word puhpowee, the Anishinabe word for the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. “As a biologist I was stunned that such a word existed,” Kimmerer writes, adding that Western natural science has no such term, no words to hold the mystery of invisible energies. While she admires botany for its “intimate vocabulary that names each little part” of a plant, she is conscious that something is missing when you reduce a creature to its working parts. Kimmerer calls this a “a grave loss in translation from the native languages.”

When those seafaring French naturalists aboard the Étoile decided to call this delicate pink flower a bougainvillea and when the “Buginvillea spectabilis” was finally entered into the second volume of the fourth edition of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum in 1799, what was lost was not just the local name of a bract. It was one of countless missed opportunities to counterpoint the Enlightenment view of the world, which European explorers carried around the world as the foundation of knowledge. Perhaps there was a brief moment there when we could have chartered a different relationship to nature that might have saved our planet from the environmental blunders that were set in motion with the Industrial Revolution.

It is also worth remembering that the male European dominance over natural history in this particular moment also represented a break in another tradition: herbalism. Traditionally, across many cultures, women were the mistresses of the world of herbs and plants. Natural history was mostly a domestic science, used in medicine and cooking.

But with botany emerging as a science in the eighteenth century, men of science began claiming for themselves the role of taxonomers and natural history experts, especially after Carl Linnaeus’s system of classifying plants according to their sexual and reproductive qualities threw the shadow of immodesty over the study of botany. Jeanne Baret’s biographer, Glynis Ridely, speculates that Baret was an herb woman who came into contact with the naturalist Commerçon because she was a source of information for him.

In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt traces the history of modern travel writing to this particular moment. “The South Sea expeditions of Cook and Bougainville, first organized around the transit of Venus in 1768, inaugurated the era of scientific travel and scientific travel writing,” she says. With Cook mapping the shores of Australia, those voyages marked the end of the era of European navigational exploration.

Now that there were no more new shores to plant the flag on, exploration shifted inland, aided and abetted by the naturalists and botanists and illustrators who found it easier to get sponsored by their governments and monarchs to accompany such expeditions. Much like the U.S. journalists who were embedded with U.S. soldiers during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, these supposedly neutral scholars and scientists would also disguise their sympathies under the cloak of seeking and classifying and disseminating information.

Pratt breaks down how scientific and later sentimental travel writing comes out of a European knowledge-building project that in turn was both tool and disguise for colonial expansion. Natural history asserted the European male authority over the planet and his rationalist, extractive understanding of people and places as opposed to experiential, community-oriented understanding. It anointed the white male authority figure as an obvious choice for the narrator of travel writing. This authority was a more utopian, innocent version of the colonial explorer’s authority. It was concerned more with science and natural history, but it managed to reinforce the expansionist systems of European surveillance and appropriation of resources.

The insidiousness by which natural history explorations continued the colonial project while setting themselves apart from it reminds me of how in our own times, tourists will often set themselves apart from other tourists by calling themselves travelers. While tourists are derided for their all-too-obvious desires, their kitschy souvenirs and their group travels, travelers are somehow deeper and seeking profound experiences. They may take the shape of voluntourists, who are convinced they are making the Third World a better place, or spiritual seekers looking to discover who they are amid the squalor. Increasingly plain old tourism is being whitewashed and greenwashed into “travel” in the same way that mercantile exploring was reframed as natural history explorations. But these reinventions are still operating within the same voyeuristic paradigms that their predecessors set in place.

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From Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib. Copyright © 2023. Available from Catapult Books.

The International Space Station is a beguiling thing. Twenty-three years into its orbiting life, twenty-three years of continual human habitation, fifteen contributing nations, its story is an eloquent testament to international human collaboration. It’s the most expensive manmade object ever created, staggeringly complex and ingenious.

At the same time it’s become almost mythological in the human psyche—a point of moving light visible from earth, a silhouetted butterfly passing the moon, comforting in its unfaltering repeating transits.

As well as being technology and mythology, it’s also time capsule. Yes, new modules are added and there are constant innovations and renovations, but the original parts of the ISS are now well over twenty five years old. That’s a stately age for something bombing through low earth orbit at 17500 miles per hour, day in, day out—withstanding extreme heat, cold and solar radiation, pelted with space junk.

Marvelously, as a result, some parts of the Station are now in fact quite retro. They look more vintage than cutting-edge. The Russian segments, Zarya and Zvezda, are among the oldest, their internal parts fitted in the mid-1980s. Their walls are covered in oppressive green Velcro, handy for sticking things to in microgravity but now deemed a fire risk.

Many of the Station’s fittings are clunky and brutalist—not at all the corporate Disney-sleek lines of Space X tech that we see now. There’s a lot of disheartening beige. The “shower” is a pouch of water, a cloth and some rinseless soap. Lately, cracks have appeared in the Zarya module which a spokesperson has described, inspiringly, as ‘”bad.”

This splendid, sci-fi craft is orbiting its way into obsolescence. How tantalizing, from a writing point of view—the passing into nostalgia of something once trailblazing. Sci-fi, in becoming sci-fact, has become what I see as a whole new imaginative terrain, a kind of sci-pastoral. Space pastoral. With the outmoded Station and its gradual demise, an era ends. A technological and political era, but also a whole way of apprehending space and our relationship to it. A certain—if it’s not too simplistic to say it—lapse of innocence.

It isn’t just the spacecraft itself that has aged; some of its founding principles look kind of vintage now too. Consider that a quarter of a century ago the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, named one of its ISS modules “Zarya” (Dawn), signifying a new dawn in international cooperation in both geo- and space politics. Even if the relationship between Russia and the West was born more of expediency than love, still, it rattled on soundly enough.

And now, well—we’ve progressed (if that’s the word) to war and the complete collapse of that relationship. Where has that new dawn gone? Its last vestiges are orbiting the earth. Its ambitions are encoded into those hurtling titanium and steel modules: Dawn, Destiny, Harmony, Unity. Those cracking metal shells.

Enemies co-habit up there, cooperate there, share food stores, cut one another’s hair. Probably not for a great deal longer—Russia threatens to pull out of the ISS and it almost certainly will at some point—but for the time being the craft is a magnificent relic, a repository of disintegrated diplomatic dreams.

And then there’s the environment of low earth orbit itself that testifies to change. In 1961, a rocket upper stage exploded and its debris—about two hundred recorded fragments—was the first of its kind to enter into earth orbit. No human-made space debris had been created by a satellite breakup before then. Gradually this became more commonplace, but since the start of the twenty-first century, when countries all over the world started shooting satellites into orbit, the increase has been exponential.

Now there are millions of pieces of human-made debris orbiting the earth. They make human navigation complicated and dangerous; relatively often, the Station will slightly alter its course to avoid known debris, but the greater problem is the debris too small to have been catalogued—given the speeds of travel involved, a single fleck of paint can crack an ISS window.

What was once the new frontier, the pristine, humanless, ferocious expanse of low earth orbit, has become a rubbish dump we can’t clear up. We’ve done as we’re given to do—discover, domesticate, trash. Now consider again our time-capsule craft its determined orbit, speed-dodging old rocket payloads and spanners dropped by spacewalking astronauts. Can we really look at what we’ve done to the wilderness of low earth orbit and not feel a certain pang? A wish that this too had not been vandalized?

For that wilderness I feel the same strange, somewhat baseless—since I never experienced it—nostalgia I feel for medieval England, full of silent forests and eagles and wild boar. Something cellular in me longs for that again. This is what I mean by the imaginative field of space pastoral, the idea that space, too, has become subject to warm and probably useless thoughts of the good old days.

Yet meanwhile we set our sights on Mars. Space is no longer one thing; it’s the dusty past and cutting-edge future sharing surfaces with one another.

As for Mars. Our designs on that, too, lend the ISS what is beginning to look like a vintage charm. Granted that the ISS is a monumental and astonishing piece of science with specific goals, not least of which is to prepare equipment and astronauts for longer and deeper space missions.

It was always a step toward Mars. It was never an exercise in sentiment—but. But, it’s a craft that circles the earth from a distance of a mere 250 miles. It’s run collaboratively by national space agencies and everything that happens there (at least on the NASA/ESA side), every piece of science, all data, is in the public domain, ostensibly for the public good. It’s international, it came complete with a set of collaborative values on which it has delivered.

Contrast that to now, when space exploration is so commercially driven; every proposed endeavor in space travel is a part-privatized competitive effort not to circle and observe the earth but to get away from it, to the moon, which we plan to mine and build a base on, and ultimately to Mars. To get there first—fast! before Russia, China and India—to stake claims and to exploit resources, mostly for commercial gain.

The quarter of a century the ISS has spent in low orbit looks, by comparison, humble in its dedication to our planet. There’s something vigilant and devoted and democratic, even if just symbolically, in its steadfast orbit. Its observance of our weather, our animal migrations, our changing topographies; its ability, by virtue of its overview, to help contain fires and oil-spills.

It is by any measure a beautiful experiment that has almost served its time. In 2030 it will begin to be de-orbited and crash-landed piece by piece into the Pacific. It’s as if, as an entity, it perfectly projects humanity’s psychic shift from earthbound to extra-planetary as our curious restless spirit itches for the new.

What of those warm and probably useless thoughts of the good old space days? I do know that nostalgia can be a dull and forceless thing. I know too that on my gravestone will never be written he words: She Was a Great Adaptor. Left to me, humanity wouldn’t have progressed from caves and if it hadn’t already died out would be catching the odd rabbit which it would then feel bad about eating.

But in fact I found that this idea of literary pastoral was potent when I came to write about space. Here’s the slender whispering arc of our planet’s atmosphere, inside of which the auroras fret; behind which the moon distorts and the stars tumble. Here’s the dense crowded field of constellations at the Milky Way’s heart. Things that stagger you with their grand improbability.

And it seemed that if ever there were a vantage point for such writing it had to be this great space-hide we call the ISS, this ship that for almost a quarter of a century has been watching us and our acreage of cosmos with a faithful, quiet attention, just as the shepherd in the traditional literary pastoral watches his flock.

The Space Station as a new-millenium shepherd, inveterate wanderer, witness to loveliness, dependably circling. Its very presence in descriptions of space inscribes those descriptions with time and lends them vanishing points. I find this space-age relic, this embattled, dented dream-capsule, and everything it symbolizes, just captivating. On it goes, carrying at 17.5k miles an hour a lost era, an era that was once our golden future.

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey is available via Grove Atlantic.

At the Canadian Museum of History in Quebec, there is a small ivory carving of an upright female form with a wolf head fashioned by the hands of a Tuniit craftsman, ancestor of the Inuit from the central Arctic. Feet apart. Arms dropped at the hips. Slender waist. Wide hips. Pointed jaw. Big ears.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Mestiza Latina author of the classic Women Who Run with the Wolves, tells the story of La Loba, the old Wolf Woman. She who is ancient and knowing, a wanderer practiced at remaining unnoticed. With a home hidden in the outskirts, La Loba is a bone collector, gathering “especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world.” She wanders up arroyos and into the mountains in search of bones. Wolf bones in particular. And what she finds, she carries home to her hearth, to assemble fireside, carefully placing one bone with another. After she has restored a skeleton whole and intact, she sings. This is how the wolf returns to being, and this is when the wolf runs. And always somehow in the motion of the wolf racing free, whether by sheer speed regained or simply the quality of light on fur, the wolf transforms into a woman, laughing, as she runs toward the horizon.

Transformation is at the heart of many a story about wolves. Whether people becoming wolves or wolves becoming people, or whales, or perhaps most ancient in memory, simply the friendship, kinship, of people and the wolf.

Orcas, or killer whales, the largest member of the dolphin family, are also known as “sea wolves.” The meaning isn’t arbitrary. Their behavior is very similar. Both the orca and wolf are hunters, devoted to their families, and also have close affinity with humans. Orcas have also been similarly projected upon, associated with supposed wolf-like malevolence, made out to be ferocious and liable to attack human beings at any opportunity, which neither wolf nor whale are actually known to do.

Maquinna (Lewis George), hereditary Chief of the Ahousaht First Nation, recounts his people’s understanding of the wolf/whale: “Wolves are really a sacred being for us. In our belief the wolf transforms into a killer whale. We feel that the wolf and the killer whale are one in the same creature.” When asked what’s so special about wolves? And, moreover, why do humans have a different relationship with them than other carnivores? His response was, “None of the other animals that I know of have the ability to transform. That ability is very special and unique, and it’s healing.”

In the Irish animaion Wolfwalkers another version of transformation occurs. The story is about a father and daughter, the father hired from neighboring England to serve authoritarian Irish Lord Protector as his wolf killer. The daughter, trailing her father into the woods to escape the confines of a village centered on religious hierarchy and the felling of old-growth forest, encounters wolf girl. At first the two are rivals, but soon become friends, and when the English child wakes up in her loft a day later, she realizes she has become a wolf child also. The wolf girl had healed her with wolf magic, giving her the ability to transform. With the skill of the wolf, she could be free, run like the wind, and follow scent farther than sight, yet now she was an outlaw. Her father, the hired man, doesn’t recognize her. She must learn to use her transformation carefully.

Wolf girl’s mother, also a wolf-human hybrid, is trapped by the lord during her transformation as a wolf. She is a possession he uses to intimidate the village folk, fully aware of her power. She is his conquest he wants to force into submission and in this way assume power that is not his own. The two daughters work together to free her. Afterwards, the wolf killer for hire joins his daughter and her friends, becoming a wolf himself.

In Princess Mononoke, the famous Japanese animation by Hayao Miyazaki, two of the main characters are a forest princess and a giant white wolf. Like many of Miyazaki’s films, the story centers around animate gods in response to the forces of reckless human consumption—whether industry or war, fiercely intertwined. The term mononoke, or もののけ, is a Japanese word for shape-shifting beings that can possess people and cause suffering, disease, or death. San, the wolf rider, has renounced human society. Her nemesis is Eboshi, who is devoted to the people of Irontown, named as it is for the ore the community unearths at the expense of natural law. The Forest Spirit, a deer-like creature with antlers as prominent as the fan of peacock plumage, offers healing and renewal even through death.

My friend Lorraine Nez shared this true story with me about a relative of hers: In the late 1800s, a Sicangu Lakota tipi camp was attacked by militant settlers and burned to the ground. Only a baby survived. When the murderers were gone, wolves arrived. They found the infant and took her with them. A few years later, another Lakota family group was traveling through the area and encountered a cave—the wolves’ den—where this child was found crawling around. The wolves allowed her people to reclaim her. Once grown, she was known to camp at the edge of the village where the wolves could visit her, but also because her strong sense of smell was overwhelmed by village life. She had received the skills of scent and sight from the wolves, and so became a healer who knew when and where her help and medicine were needed. She could smell sickness and, with this knowledge, bring medicine for healing. She also had the eyes of a wolf, capable of seeing at night. There were times she would travel by night to skirt enemy territory, accompanied by the wolves who protected her and helped keep her fed. To this day, she is remembered as the woman who lived with wolves.

Wolves are the most persecuted animals in the world, with the most distorted reputation. To write about a creature at once mythic and also gravely disappeared is like writing about a shadow, a dream, a fleeting vision of what was, what could be yet. How does one do justice to this creature, in writing? Who she is, who she has long been known as and who she is projected to be, inaccurately. These are questions I reckoned with in writing a book about wolves and women and wisdom traditions—which led to writing about metaphorical thinking, how people are mirrored in the metaphor of wolf. A metaphor that embodies worldviews colliding, and the collision, the fallout, we live with still.

What became obvious is that wolves have been persecuted in identical ways to certain people such as to rob them of their wisdom, bearing, and strength—one could say wolf-like knowing—for the controllers unrequited gain. And, that perspectives which consider Wolf a relative, hence someone with whom we have a relationship, and for which there are protocols for our part of that relationship, have far greater longevity and practical know-how in sustaining life on Earth. The transformation stories I encountered speak to this, in a deep way. They also echo the meaning imbued in the Ojibwe word for wolf, Ma’iingan, translated to mean: “the one sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way.”

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From Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves and Women by Sonja Swift. Copyright © 2023. Available from Rocky Mountain Books.

John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Per Frederick Studemann, chair of judges for the prize:

Fire Weather brings together a series of harrowing human stories with science and geo-economics, in an extraordinary and elegantly rendered account of a terrifying climate disaster that engulfed a community and industry, underscoring our toxic relationship with fossil fuels. Moving back and forth in time, across subjects, and from the particular to the global, this meticulously researched, thrillingly told book forces readers to engage with one of the most urgent issues of our time.

The climate disaster in question is the 2016 wildfire that swept through Fort McMurray, in Alberta, Canada, swallowing half a million acres of land and displacing nearly 100,000 people. You can read an excerpt from Fire Weather here.

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction is awarded annually, and comes with a £50,000 prize.

Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.”

“I have a problem I would like solved,” wrote Anna Louise of Falls Church, Virginia. “I would like to know how color gets into a bird’s feather.” Dear Mr. Einstein was asked the age of Earth and whether life could exist without the sun (to which he replied that it very much could not). One child asked him whether all geniuses were bound to go insane. Frank, from Bristol, Pennsylvania, asked what was beyond the sky—“My mother said you could tell me.”

Kenneth, from Asheboro, North Carolina, was more philosophical: “We would like to know, if nobody is around and a tree falls, would there be a sound, and why.” Similarly, Peter, from Chelsea, Massachusetts, drove straight to the heart of human inquiry: “I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me what Time is, what the soul is, and what the heavens are.”

Other questions were not quite so fraught. A boy named John informed Einstein that “my father and I are going to build a rocket and go to Mars or Venus. We hope you will go too. We want you to go because we need a good scientist and someone who can guide a rocket good.”

Occasionally, skeptical correspondents emerged, such as June, a twelve-year-old student from Trail Junior High School in British Columbia, Canada. “Dear Mr. Einstein,” she wrote. “I am writing to you to find out if you really exist. You may think this very strange, but some pupils in our class thought that you were a comic strip character.”

In a similar vein, Myfanwy from South Africa had thought Einstein dead:

I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time. I must have been mixing you up with Sir Isaac Newton or someone. Anyway, I discovered during Math one day that the mistress was talking about the most brilliant scientists. She mentioned that you were in America, and when I asked whether you were buried there, and not in England, she said, Well, you were not dead yet. I was so excited when I heard that, that I all but got a Math detention!

Myfanwy proceeded to tell Einstein how she and her friend Pat Wilson would sneak around the school at night to carry out astronomical observations, and about her love of science. “How can Space go on forever?” she wondered. “I am sorry that you have become an American citizen,” she finished. “I would much prefer you in England.” Einstein was obviously taken with Myfanwy’s exuberance, as he sent her a reply in which he praised her nighttime escapades and apologized for remaining alive. (“There will be a remedy for this, however.”)

On his seventy-sixth birthday, Einstein was sent a pair of cuff links and a tie by the fifth-grade children of Farmingdale Elementary School in Pleasant Plains, Illinois. “Your gift,” he wrote to them, “will be an appropriate suggestion to be a little more elegant in the future than hitherto. Because neckties and cuffs exist for me only as remote memories.”

This was one of Einstein’s last letters. He died around three weeks after writing it.

*

In December 1925, the young Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was holed up in the village of Arosa, Switzerland, with one of his mistresses. He was there for his health: suspecting a mild case of tuberculosis, his doctors had ordered him to rest at high altitude. There, among the calm of the mountains and deep snow, placing a pearl in each of his ears when he wanted quiet, he developed a theory that became known as “wave mechanics.”

Schrödinger’s theory was inspired by the ideas of Louis de Broglie, a physicist who in his doctoral thesis of 1924 had showed how to calculate the wavelength of a particle based on its momentum. In 1905, Einstein had demonstrated that waves can act like particles. What de Broglie argued was that particles can act like waves.

Wave mechanics provided a set of equations that prescribed how wavelike particles could behave. On first encounter with the theory, Einstein and many others were impressed and pleased with its useful- ness, but it was soon noticed that some implications of Schrödinger’s mechanics were a little problematic. For one thing, the theory stated that the waves it described would, given time, propagate over a very large area, much like a ripple on the surface of a lake spreading out and out, making for the shore. But Schrödinger’s waves were, of course, also particles—they were electrons and other subatomic objects. To Einstein it seemed almost nonsensical to say that an electron would propagate over such enormous distances. It simply didn’t accord with reality.

So Schrödinger’s mathematical description of waves raised a question. If it didn’t represent literal waves, waves in the real world, what did it represent? Einstein’s good friend Max Born, a professor at the University of Göttingen, devised an answer: it represented the probability of a particle’s location. Which is to say that each particle has what’s called a “wave function,” and one can use this to predict the likelihood of finding a particular particle in a particular place.

Put an electron in a box. According to this idea, the electron has a number of potential locations spread throughout the box, and it exists in a kind of muddled-up mixture of all these possible positions. This mixture is mathematically represented by the electron’s wave function, which gives us the various different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various different locations within the box.

Einstein, consistently throughout his career, was unhappy with quantum mechanics’ reliance on probability. In fact, he did not like it at all. He strongly believed, even though evidence suggested otherwise, that at a deep level the universe was not run on chance and that the order apparent in the observable universe was built on order in the subatomic realm.

When debating with the theory’s various advocates, he would often tell them, “God does not play dice.” To which Niels Bohr had a rejoinder: “It cannot be for us to tell God how he is to run the world”—or in other words, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

*

In the summer of 1925, when he was twenty-three years old, Werner Heisenberg traveled to the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea, hoping that its beaches and sheer cliffs would allay his bad hay fever. There, in one intense night, he finalized his interpretation of the difficulties of the quantum realm. Heisenberg worked from the premise that he could completely ignore what could not be observed, measured, or proved to be true. This sounds quite reasonable, but in this instance it meant that, in order to develop his theory of the laws that govern the behavior of electrons, he made no effort to describe, or really even to think about, the motions or orbits of electrons, as they could not be observed. Instead, he looked at the light emitted by electrons under different circumstances. If you bombard an atom with light or disturb it in other ways, an electron will produce light. Heisenberg looked at what went in and what came out, and didn’t concern himself about what happened in between. The result was a paper so mathematically complicated that he couldn’t fully understand it himself. He gave the paper to his supervisor, Max Born, and then went camping, hoping that Born might be able to figure it out for him. Born did just that, and had the paper published.

Einstein didn’t like Heisenberg’s approach any more than he liked Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. He called it “a big quantum egg” and declared outright to one of his friends that he didn’t believe in it. The problem, as far as Einstein was concerned, was that Heisenberg had skipped over the need to actually understand what was happening. The mathematics didn’t really require you to “know” anything about what the electrons were up to between the input and output—they could be doing anything, and it wouldn’t affect Heisenberg’s theory. To Einstein that wasn’t a good enough description of reality.

In 1926, Heisenberg came to Berlin to give a lecture. Einstein, who had already exchanged a few letters with the radical young man, invited him to visit his house, where they soon fell to arguing, as was only to be expected. Heisenberg thought that he would be able to win his host around to his way of thinking, precisely because it had once been Einstein’s way of thinking. With relativity, Einstein had done away with seemingly logical but—crucially—unobservable concepts, such as the ether or Newton’s absolute space and time, and produced a sweeping, progressive theory. Heisenberg felt he was up to much the same thing.

“We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom. A good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes,” Heisenberg insisted. “But you don’t seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?”

“Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?”

“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning, but it is nonsense all the same.”

Einstein was at least consistent in his contrariness to his old beliefs.

To his friend Philipp Frank he made a similar complaint.

“A new fashion has arisen in physics,” he rumbled, “which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality.”

“But the fashion you speak of was invented by you in 1905!” Frank reminded him with amused disbelief.

“A good joke should not be repeated too often.”

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Excerpted from Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particlesby Samuel Graydon. Copyright © 2023 by Samuel Graydon. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, “Taar aaya hai.” In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a “taar”—a telegram—usually meant bad news. Few homes had telephones, so far-­flung family would send updates of their children, cooking, and cricket scores via the well-­named snail mail. Only if a matter was more pressing and urgent would they send the news via telegram.

Babuji, as we all called him, tore open the envelope and took out a sheet of pale blue paper. On it was glued a strip of white paper that contained three words: ANXIOUS TO RETURN. He looked at his wife, rolled his eyes, and reassured her that there was nothing to worry about.

After graduating college, Babuji’s son Shekhar had traveled to Italy to look for work. Evidently, he didn’t like it there and wanted to return, but Babuji was determined that Shekhar should give it a shot. So, he put on his chappals and walked down to the post office to send a telegram saying so, using as few words as possible, because telegrams weren’t cheap and were charged by length. Over the next few weeks, many more telegrams arrived from Italy, begging for a ticket back to Bombay. After ignoring many of them, Babuji finally relented. His son, my uncle, returned to Bombay, where he lived out his days.

Less than sixty years later, each week of pandemic lockdown was punctuated by the demanding squeaks of my toddler: “I want talk Nani right now!” The child of a pandemic, there were eighteen months of her life when she couldn’t see her grandparents in person, so her demands to speak to her grandma were swiftly obeyed. With the swish of a finger on a touchscreen, a call flew through the air to the other side of the planet, to which my mom responded. She saw my daughter crawl for the first time, and speak her early words, in color, live, on the screen of a smartphone. When I stop to think about the ease with which we were able to stay in touch through those tough times, I find myself not only in awe of how far we have come but also immensely grateful.

We have been through a radical shift in technology across just three generations of my family, and each step of the way has changed our lives dramatically, just as they did for society as a whole: allowing us to communicate with our loved ones, creating the world of instant news, changing the way we work, and altering the way we entertain and are entertained. But while a video call may seem a far cry from the telegram, all these forms of modern communication are based on the science of signals being sent from one distant point to another, almost instantaneously. And our ability to do that centers around magnets.

I find magnets magical. The magnetic fields that radiate from them are invisible, but they can be substantial, far-­reaching, and influential across large distances. The science is complex and wasn’t understood for thousands of years—­indeed, many physicists will tell you that magnetism, and especially electromagnetism, still isn’t fully understood. But once we had at least some understanding, we were able to create practical mechanisms. Humans harnessed the magic of magnets to create machines that could interact and exert forces on other machines, farther away than had ever been thought possible.

Unlike the inventions we’ve looked at so far, magnets—­or objects that exert magnetic forces—­exist in the very essence of our universe. You and I are magnets (very, very weak ones—­don’t worry, there’s no danger of us suddenly becoming attached to our refrigerators). Atoms, the minuscule building blocks of matter, are magnetic. The planet on which we live is a giant magnet. Magnets, unlike wheels and nails and springs, were discovered rather than invented by humans. Despite this, they nonetheless deserve their place in this book, because it was humans who figured out how to make them more useful than they were as supplied by Mother Nature. The magnets we found naturally in our surroundings a few thousand years ago were weak and hard to come by. They were formed of magnetite, which came to be known as lodestone, a natural mineral found in the earth that is a mix of iron and oxygen, plus other impurities. It’s a magnetic material, but only a small proportion of the magnetite that exists in nature is magnetic, because it needs both a specific combination of impurities inside it, and to have been exposed to specific conditions of heat and magnetic fields outside it.

The earliest references to this natural magnet date back to ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE. Around two hundred years later, the Chinese documented the phenomenon of a natural stone attracting iron, and in another four hundred years, they began using this material for geomancy (a form of divination). It took another thousand years, advancing into the Middle Ages, before it was used for navigation in the form of a compass. Navigators in the Song Dynasty in China shaped lodestone to look like a fish, and let it float freely in water, so it pointed south. This knowledge spread to Europe and the Middle East soon after. Even then, with over a thousand years of knowing about natural magnets, we couldn’t replicate them, and their use was restricted to navigation.

Magnets themselves come in two distinct forms: permanent magnets and electromagnets. Permanent magnets are the horseshoe-­ and bar-­shaped magnets we saw in school science demonstrations and those that decorate our refrigerators. They have two poles, north and south: bringing together the south poles or the north poles of two magnets creates a pushing or repulsion force, but bring a north and south pole together and the magnets will cling to each other.

It took millennia to come to grips with how magnetism works, because this requires an advanced understanding of atomic physics and material science. To become a magnet, a material requires many particles, at many different scales, behaving in a very particular way. Let’s start with the electrons that orbit the nucleus of an atom. Just as electrons have a negative electric charge, they also have what physicists call spin, which defines its magnetic characteristics. By “pointing” in different directions, the spin cancels out the magnetic forces of electrons entirely in some atoms, leaving them nonmagnetic. But in others, while some of the electrons are arranged so their spin cancels out, not all are, so there is a net magnetic force left over, creating a magnetic atom.

Then, if we zoom out from the electron scale to the atomic scale, the atoms in an element are naturally arranged at random, which means that the magnetic forces of the individual atoms cancel each other out. In some materials, however, little pockets of atoms—­called domains—­have atoms all arranged in the same direction, giving the domain a net magnetism. However, they are not yet magnets, because the domains themselves are usually arranged at random.

To make a material produce a net magnetism, then, the atoms in the majority of the domains need to be forced into magnetic alignment by a strong external magnetic field, or by large amounts of heat applied at particular temperatures in particular sequences. Once the domains point in the same direction, you have a magnet.

Even today, there is a debate as to how magnetite becomes magnetized in the first place, so artificially replicating this has been a challenge. Certain materials like iron, cobalt, and nickel have electrons favorably arranged to make their atoms magnetic, which in turn sit in well-­defined domains. Our ancestors tinkered with mixes of such metals, heating and cooling them in various combinations to try to figure out the best recipe for forming permanent magnets. They succeeded, to a degree, making somewhat weak magnets that didn’t hold their force for long.

The development of permanent magnets in a scientific way started in the seventeenth century, when Dr. William Gilbert published De Magnete, which outlined his experimentation with magnetic materials. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we developed more sophisticated methods for making iron and steel, and observed that certain combinations made much stronger or longer-­lasting magnets—­and sometimes even both. But we still didn’t really understand why. The nineteenth century also saw the advent of understanding electromagnetism, which we’ll come back to, but it took until the twentieth century and the conception of quantum physics before we were able to define and understand atoms and electrons well enough to create strong and long-­lasting permanent magnets ourselves.

This led to the use of three types of materials to make permanent magnets: metals, ceramics, and rare-­earth minerals. The first major improvement was the development of a metal mix of aluminum-­nickel-­cobalt, used to make “alnico” magnets, but these were complicated and expensive to make. Then in the 1940s, ceramic magnets were created from pressing together tiny balls of barium or strontium with iron. These were much cheaper, and today account for the vast majority of permanent magnets produced by weight. The third family of materials are the rare-­earth magnets, based on elements like samarium, cerium, yttrium, praseodymium, and others.

Within the space of the last century, these three types of permanent magnets have been refined to produce produced magnetic fields 200 times stronger than before. And this improved efficiency led to permanent magnets playing an important role in much of our modern lives: a car, for example, can have thirty separate applications for magnets, using over 100 individual magnets. Thermostats, door latches, speakers, motors, brakes, generators, body scanners, electric circuitry and components—­take any of these apart and you’ll find permanent magnets.

But as we saw, the stories of permanent magnets and electromagnets intertwine, and since the discovery of electromagnets around 200 years ago, each has swung in and out of favor as humanity learned more about how they worked and what they could be used for. The prevalence of permanent magnets in the past few decades is due not just to their increasing strength and compactness but also to the fact that, unlike electromagnets, they never need a source of power. But from the nineteenth century onward, and even today in situations where immense fields are needed, electromagnets dominated. We can control their strength, switching off or cranking up the magnetic field of an electromagnet when it suits.

The reason electromagnets took so long to make an appearance in the field is because we needed an understanding of the science of materials, electricity, and light—­and the mysterious force of electromagnetism. It’s only when we were able to move electrons in materials that we understood how to create and change this force and apply it to our technology.

Like gravity, electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces in nature. It is the physical interaction that happens between particles, like electrons, that have an electric charge. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, André-­Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and other scientists published numerous theories about electric and magnetic fields, which were eventually brought together and summarized by the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell in what are now known as “Maxwell’s equations.” These gave us crucial information that led to the invention of electric motors, and these equations are also the basis of our power grids, radios, telephones, printers, air conditioners, hard drives, and data-­storage devices; they are even used in the creation of powerful microscopes.

The key principle that led to such technological advancement was the realization that moving charges create magnetic fields. Without getting too deep into the complex science, this means that if an electric current is flowing through a coil of wire, it behaves like a magnet. If you change the strength of the current, you change the strength of the magnet. And the converse is also true: applying a variable magnetic field near a wire will create an electric current in the wire. Following on from this science, experiments proved that when a charge, like an electron, moves within a magnetic field (either freely or inside a wire), it feels a pushing force.

Studying the electromagnetic force led us to define the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves. Think of these as waves of force that flow because of the interaction between electric and magnetic fields. Our understanding of light increased manifold when we were able to quantify it as an electromagnetic wave. And, in addition to visible light, we saw that a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves—­from radio waves (with the longest wavelength) to gamma rays (with the shortest)—­exists, and that these waves can be used in different ways. It is electromagnetism and electromagnetic waves that form the basis of our long-­range communication technology: the technology used by countless people around the world to share news with their loved ones. People like my uncle, the prolific sender of telegrams.

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From Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal. Copyright © 2023. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.