Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The princess’s objection May 6th, 1643, The Hague. She writes in French, puts ink to paper. Plainly, for all who watch, her arms move like clever machines. But something hides in the mechanism. Motion is transferred by contact, pen to paper — one body pushes, and another body pushes back. She lifts her arm, pausing: What …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The brain that broke time Your browser does not support the audio tag. A beam of light cuts the darkness, illuminating the boy who runs to keep pace. The light beam runner moves and moves fast, until matching the light exactly. He watches the crests and troughs of the light drift into motionless; the frozen light …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin Lucretius and the hooked atoms Around the middle of the first century before our era, the Roman poet Lucretius set out to explain the whole of nature in verse, and when he came to the senses he gave an account that was, for its time, a triumph of materialism. Following the Greek atomists Democritus and Epicurus, …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin Two letters, one idea, June 1858 In the third week of June 1858, a parcel reached Down House in Kent, carried by the ordinary post from an island in the Malay Archipelago. Charles Darwin opened it and read, in the hand of a younger naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, a short essay written in a fever …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin A story of the forest and its end It is 1765 in the pinewoods of Prussia and Saxony, the old woodland — a tangle of species, ages, undergrowth, fungi and rot — is the thing that escapes us. We take the familiar and impose it on the land, planting the Normalbaum, the ideal tree: the woodland …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The physicist’s question In February 1943, in a lecture hall at Trinity College Dublin, a physicist exiled from Austria stood up to answer a question that was not, strictly, one he was accustomed to asking. Erwin Schrödinger—one of the founders of quantum mechanics—had titled his public lectures “What Is Life?” His question was concrete: what must …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The curse of the wires On the sixth of February, 1861, with the United States weeks away from tearing itself in two, a Philadelphia newspaper called the Morning Pennsylvanian ran a short editorial under a plain and confident heading: “The Telegraph—Its Abuses.” The telegraph was then the most advanced information technology on earth, a nervous system …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The most obvious fact in the sky For roughly fourteen centuries, the most obvious fact was that the Earth stood still and the heavens turned around it. It was tangible. It was perceived. The sun rose in the east and set in the west; the stars swirled overhead according to their fixed, mathematical schedule; the ground …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin A loom in Lyon, 1804 In 1804, in Lyon, Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a loom driven by a chain of punched cards. Each card governed a single pass of the weave, and each position on it posed a binary. Up or down, one or zero. Out of the mechanical movement, the binary choices, came fabrics of …
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Joel Kowalewski, PhD Linkedin The word we changed in 1956 For seven years beginning in 1946, a singular interdisciplinary group convened in New York under the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation: the mathematician Norbert Wiener, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, the logician Walter Pitts, the information theorist Claude Shannon, the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, the psychiatrist W. Ross Ashby. Their …
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