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(Image credit: NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash) Is climate change responsible for the quality of our mid-summer thoughts?  In this heat, our thoughts have turned from a caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation (see our soul-in-its-butterfly-formulation) to recent transformational scientific advances around the idea that there may be other human settlement in this universe.  While the first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917, the first confirmation of the detection occurred only in 1992, with the number of exoplanets discovered as of 2012 was still fewer than 100 (twenty years after the first).  With the launch of the Kepler planet-hunting probe...

Do you feel a little like a butterfly now that we are coming out of Covid?  Or does the April and May vibes give us that caterpillar-turning-into-butterfly feeling, as winter morphs into spring (and soon summer)? Time to leaving behind the baggage that is unproductive and negative, so we can evolve and continue and iterate.    Butterflies are some of the most beautiful specimens and there are about 17,500 species of them in the world, a symbol of transformation and resilience in change.  Do beautiful things emerge from the most unlikely and unpromising of things?  If you must, you should get...

As we enter the season for stargazing, when the skies are wintry, cold and clear, we look forward to those cloudless nights that reveal a bright canopy of stars.  As we get closer to Christmas, it is also the time when astronomy is celebrated: the magi, three wise men from Persia, followed a star to Bethlehem. What star was it?  A comet?  A meteor?  We have no idea.. What is interesting is that the star of Bethlehem rarely appears in Renaissance paintings and does not seem to have interested 15th-century artists like Gozzoli, Botticelli or the like. Even the infinitely...

Where do the arts and the sciences connect, and where and how do they part company?  One of the most illuminating and nuanced answers to this question was offered by way of a distinction between “thought” and “cognition”, by Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers about the human condition of our time (and who actually wrote the influential The Human Condition).  “Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by “idle curiosity”; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has...

We love the philosophical and lyrical meditations about stars and the laws of energy by physicist and writer Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities:   “Nature may at times appear to be a Painter or a Philosopher or a Celestial Spirit.  But deep down she is a Scientist.  She is quantitative.  She is logical.  And nothing better illustrates her ruthless and unyielding adherence to that logic than the law of the conservation of energy.  Energy does not appear out of nothing.  Energy does not disappear into...