Can Personal Meaning Be Derived From Science?

Published in Leonardo, February, 2014, Vol. 47, #1

Abstract: The artist has derived deep personal meaning from the vast and intricate world revealed by science. Beyond facts and alluring images, it helps to provide an overall context in her life. As well, she admires the ethic of concern for the integrity of research results.

The online version differs from the previously published version in that the illustrations are in color, and the text includes new concluding remarks. These address how the attitude of scientists toward truth and discovery has informed my own life dealing with people and this society, and how it informs my ethics. 

Figure 1. Deep Yin and Yang

In 1970, when I began using science material in my art, I had been married for a decade to a physicist. It became clear that he saw the world differently: he saw research as refining an overall picture of the world, investigation by investigation. This large context extended from nanometers to millions of light years. It revealed a tantalizing space existing beyond human egos.

When my children were small, I gave a talk to my child’s nursery school about “What is education?” My gut feeling was that a big reference point for everything else we teach is a sense of where we are in space and time. My means were crude, but inexpensive: scrapbooks in loose leaf notebooks that we perused together. The boys became men, but I continue pursue this vision of Where We Are.

It is wonderfully presented by the movie, Powers of Ten,[1] illustrating the progression from subatomic particles to galactic space; also by Robert Hone’s interactive museum exhibit with time-lapse movies called Seeing Time.[2] This exhibit cleverly used the analogy of an elevator going down to travel back in time, where changes in geologic features on Cape Cod that took eons, were sped up. On the “top floor,” the present moment, one could view slow motion videos of instantaneous events.

It was my privilege in 1996 to arrange for Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams to speak to a forum for YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology at the Exploratorium. Primack, a researcher in cosmology, and Abrams, who introduced cosmology into her songs, told how they and others are putting together a new creation myth for our civilization. Most human societies have them, but the difference with this one is that it is based on research. Primack said the function of these myths is to teach each of us that we are part of a great unfolding saga much larger than ourselves. Without it, people are adrift in trivia, he averred, noting that the West has been without a generally accepted one since Galileo and his dispute with the Church 500 years ago.[3]

Primack and Abrams’ 2006 book, The View from the Center of the Universe, describes cosmology in layman’s language, but it is still rather complex for one like me to grasp. Moreover, new data will continually modify the story. Not an easy "Bible story."

The benefit of knowing comes not from the details, but from the wider view itself.  I am distressed that the overarching theme of where we are seems to be neglected in education. In particular, the existence of discrete levels of matter has fascinated me for years, which I first explored in a July 1990 Leonardo article, “An Artist Considers Levels in Matter."[4] In 1994, I felt it would be useful for me to paint a rough diagram of where we are in space.

Figure 2. The World of Small and Large

Every human should have such a breadth of perspective from an early age. I feel fortunate to have lived in a century of scientific images, and to be able to see them in my mind’s eye. Most of the images in The World of Small and Large were not available until the mid-20th century, but the innovative educator, Maria Montessori, was teaching such a world view in 1935. She put the need more eloquently than I:

“In school they want children to learn dry facts of reality, while their imagination is cultivated by fairy tales, concerned with a world that is certainly full of marvels, but not the world around them in which they live. On the other hand, by offering the child the story of the universe, we give him something a thousand times more infinite and mysterious to reconstruct with his imagination, a drama no fable can reveal.

“...[I]t will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying. The child’s mind then will no longer wander, but becomes fixed and can work. The knowledge he then acquires is organized and systematic...All are linked and have their place in the universe on which his mind is centered. The stars, earth, stones, life of all kinds form a whole in relation to each other, and so close is this relation that we cannot understand a stone without some understanding of the great sun!…”[5]

More wondrous are things we cannot readily see. My husband’s work was with subatomic particles. To Montessori’s vision, we should add that cosmic rays and neutrinos are penetrating our bodies and surroundings continuously. In addition to humans’ noisy broadcasts, white noise of radio transmissions is arriving from outer space. All of these are happening whether we have instruments to detect them or not. People call scientists materialists, yet a big part of their studies is with invisibles, such as electromagnetic waves. Rainbows, lightning and the iridescence of birds barely hint at them.

For decades, I have endeavored to show people where they are in the universe with my art.

My Methodology

A 1970 drawing, E Pluribus Unum, was the first instance in which I used the round format. I experimented with other shapes, notably hexagons, for several years. Moreover, I used a variety of media, including the textile arts, to explore patterns in nature. By 1991, I returned to the round format. Sitting at my light table, moving the design around and around as I painted, was meditative, like walking the labyrinth.

My acquaintance with digital artists made me jealous of the glowing computer screen. I found I adored working with translucent acrylic paints on Plexiglas, because it also was vivid. I carved away paint to expose the “white” of Plexiglas. Carving resulted in well-defined line work hard to achieve with a brush. A further discussion of my technique is found in an earlier Leonardo article, “The Study of Patterns is Profound,”[6]

The Essential Mysteries series

 I spent many years enjoying all the surprising and paradoxical features of relativity and quantum mechanics. In my art, I explored patterns in nature. Under it all was a curiosity about what abides, what is always true. Traditional religious teaching purports to give us this bedrock, but I wondered whether it could be derived from the natural world. I have concluded yes, but it is neither “stuff” nor doctrine. It is process and relationships: mathematical relationships, relations of humans one to another, and our relationship with the natural world.

Additionally, I was attracted to boundary areas where not enough is known, and in some cases cannot be known, as Heisenberg decisively demonstrated in 1927 with his Uncertainty Principle. Since 1991, I have focused in my works on those questions I call Essential Mysteries, those questions which eternally intrigue us, and which science never can fully resolve.

Figure 3. An Essential Mystery: Number Governs Form

Beginning in 1970, I sought inspiration for my art in science images, which soon led me into an appreciation of natural patterns. In 1974, Peter Stevens in Patterns in Nature 6 revealed to me the mathematical underpinnings of patterns, owing to the nature of space and the process of growth. This guided my studies. [see my Leonardo article, “The Study of Patterns is Profound,”[7]. Just as the success of an aircraft is governed as much by fluid dynamics calculations as it is by the stuff of its constituent parts, so the material world as a whole is defined by mathematical relations and probabilities. This was a revelation and a mystery to me. I learned from my husband that the correlation between abstract mental calculation and the behavior of material in the real world is often startling. Antimatter, neutrinos and black holes first turned up in mathematical calculations, later to be confirmed by experiment and observation.

By 1977, the ability to quickly model and graph mathematical ideas by computer was having an impact on what would be studied, and how non-mathematical people like myself could know about it. The advent of fractals, “the mathematics of wiggles,” as Benoit Mandelbrot put it, enchanted me.[8] Complexity theory, which included fractal geometry, soon followed.

My painting makes the point that mathematics is evident even in very common objects, amethyst crystals and the flower of a thistle.  In this painting and the next, I carved crystalline shapes into the Plexiglas, which wonderfully caught the light.


Figure 4. An Essential Mystery: Energy Becomes Matter

One of the great mysteries is, why is there something rather than nothing? The mathematics of theoretical physics describes most of what we know about particles and forces that interact to make the stuff of our existence. This is the “standard model” description, which has been fabulously successful. There’s a hitch: it works only it assumes an elusive particle, the Higgs boson, which imbues other particles with mass. It took a 27.4km accelerator to create particular, powerful energy levels required to search for it, and in 2012 they declared success.[9]

Ever since Einstein published his theory of relativity, we have known that energy can become matter, which, in fact, created our universe. Contemplating the Big Bang (or the great Flaring Forth), I conceived this image. I based the breaking-apart image on mud cracks. In each of my paintings, I developed a new technique. Here, I experimented with airbrush.

Figure 5. An Essential Mystery: Life Creates

Here is my first painting in what I poetically named the Essential Mysteries series. Life Creates was inspired by a microscopic one-celled animal called a radiolarian. I used a black center to suggest the living  protoplasm. Around it, white lines represent the glassy exoskeleton it creates. It was spurred by a 1977 Scientific American article[10] on how these creatures processed molecules of silica from seawater to grow their shells. “Aha!,” I thought, “the creature and its lacy inorganic exoskeleton is a visual boundary between the living and the nonliving,.”

Over the extended period in which I worked on it, I realized that there were other boundaries to explore. I made a partial list, the nexus of what became this series. I generally produced one or two paintings a year.

In Life Creates, among the mysteries are: What molecules made by the organism attract atoms of the silica dissolved in sea water? Why do they form like the the lines between bubbles in a froth, a minimal surface structure? Why does only silica attach, and not calcium carbonate, which forms shells of other creatures?

A much larger question is how did life emerge from inert matter at all? Is it a rare, freak accident? This is the subject of much current research. In my studies, I found that Stuart Kauffman, one of the architects of complexity theory, has done much computer modeling on the origin of life. He has executed models having a variety of organic chemical constructs (not actual chemicals) that demonstrate the ease with which novel compounds helpful to life, such as chlorophyll, could theoretically come together spontaneously. Chlorophyll has enabled photosynthesis, and this single new molecular compound changed Earth forever. There are so many more examples that he declared:

“[I]f life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an unexpected fulfillment of the natural order, then we are truly at home in the universe."[11]

Figure 6. An Essential Mystery: Brains Imagine

Brains Imagine! How does the assemblage of molecules, of neurons result in thought, and combining different ideas make a Eureka Moment?

What is thinking? Even the one-celled Dictyostelium forms a group, which when stressed forms a slimy aggregate called a pseudoplasmodium that can slither toward new food sources. You could say it has rudimentary volition.[12] Even colonies of the very much smaller bacteria, Paenibacillus Vortex, can process information, solve problems and make decisions.[13]

How many steps are there from an organism that is merely motile to one that imagines? We have thinking capacity galore, enough to delight in thinking for its own sake. Art, storytelling, science, philosophy, mathematics are all imaginings. Where in the brain does the imagining take place?

In 1983, when I enrolled in a basic neuropsychology course, Professor Will Gordon  said, “Get ready to fundamentally change how you see yourselves!” We learned a new geography, one that mapped specific locations for our many brain functions. Its discoveries were all made by inference, studying cognitive deficits of people with brain injuries and their autopsied brains. The very next year, 1984, the first brain imaging capability, PET scans, became available and confirmed these results. Now we use MRI scans; computer chips can even be precisely located in the motor cortex to help the disabled.

 I placed Rodin’s Thinker in the prefrontal lobe. This is the area of the brain noted for planning and ordering activities, and imposing values and restraint. Many functions were enumerated, but imagination was not one of them!

Yet, when I am caught in the grip of a wonderful idea like this, imagination seems a palpable entity. Finding the classical figures, making them equivalent in size, and working this jigsaw puzzle was a protracted effort, as was painting it. Again, I invented a technique. I covered the Plexiglas with a medium tone, and painted in the blacks. To obtain the highlights, I rubbed on them with toothpaste to gently erase some of the medium tone.

A rewarding aspect of Brains Imagine is the interaction with the imagination of the viewers. As they do double-takes, they also observe their own brains imagining.

Figure 7. An Essential Mystery: Minds Have Wanderlust

Humans have needed only imagination to love distant worlds. Ancient Hindus thought up ways to think about immensely large numbers.[14] With our minds and limited perception, we can encompass the world to the very edges of the extremely large and also the very small.

What is different today? The Hubble shows us misshapen blobs, one proto-galaxy being dated 13.2 billion years ago, almost from the beginning of the universe, 13.7 billion years ago.[15] Only recently have we inferred from new data that the number of galaxies exceeds 100 billion.[16]

At the other end of the scale, was it a fool’s errand for researchers to look for the astoundingly numerous neutrinos, invisible particles with no charge and scarcely any mass, given off by the sun? Physicists with sophisticated detectors lodged themselves deep in mine shafts to detect them—and they succeeded![17]

The "light echo" illuminating dust around the supergiant star "V838 Mon," 2004, provided the basis for this painting. I had to follow the Hubble photograph rather exactly to capture the wonderful sweep of the fluid dynamics. However, the glowing center, the colors, and the arrangement of stars are my own.

Figure 8. An Essential Mystery: Intertwingled[18]

In this painting, I have used the beautiful colors of alloys seen under the microscope with polarized light. When two metals, say zinc and copper, are melted together to make an alloy, they harden, but not in an amorphous mass like dried soup. The interleaving of the metals prevents atoms from sliding easily past one another, which explains why brass is stronger than either copper or zinc separately. This can be seen through the microscope. Some alloys crystalize in a "maze" pattern, which inspired this maze of my own invention.

While developing Intertwingled in the early 1990s, I thought about why it was speaking to me. For years, I had been helping refugees, which led me to realize how many people no longer live in the country where they were born, leading to a fantastic mixing of many cultures. The Gaia hypothesis, developed by Lovelock and Margulis in the 1970s, was gaining credence. This states that creatures have co-evolved with each other in ecological groups so that the waste of one becomes the food for the next.[19] Moreover, photosynthesizing microorganisms too numerous to count help create the oxygen in the global atmosphere. In this way, the smallest scale is intertwined with a very large one, Earth itself.[20]

Figure 9. An Essential Mystery: Death Teems with Life

An Essential Mystery: Death Teems with Life:

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan tell us, “This is a difficult lesson: the matter of our bodies, our possession, our wealth is not ours. It belongs to Earth, the the biosphere and, whether we like it or not, that is where it is headed, again and again.”[21]

This is true of the brain, residence of the mind. An "apparition" is what Roy Ascott, a "new media" professor called his internet art events. Even before the World Wide Web (www) in 1991, his improvised art pieces were created by artists around the world joining together online. When all signed off, the apparition evaporated.[22] Using this as a metaphor, I wonder: are the activities of our neurons a mere apparition, (human cultures have resisted this notion with all their hearts), or does some residual, other than the dead coral reef of our accomplishments, persist?

Figure 10. Essential Mystery that Synchrony Prevails

Interdependent processes that function almost perfectly, second by second, regulate cellular activity. In ecosystems, flora and fauna are not only tuned to each other, but are engaged in a process that plays out though time, kept in harmony by feedback systems. Synchrony! Countless interdependent processes functioning almost perfectly second by second, hour by hour, regulate cellular activity in your body, even as you read this.[23]

Odd, but communities of microorganisms that live in our feces are considered by some to be another organ of the body, one that floats freely, constantly renewing itself, and is essential for our digestion and elimination.[24]

The image, based on enlargements of two paper marblings I once did, had to be carefully painted with boundries of masking tape to make well-defined edges. To keep the two designs separated in my mind, I painted one on the top side of the Plexiglas and the other on the reverse side. Once again, I learned a new technique.

Figure 11. An Essential Mystery: Catastrophe!

This painting had a near-death experience. The previous painting on the plastic repelled me, and I vowed to start over. It would not be the first time I had laid a cloth over the Plexiglas, soaking it with rubbing alcohol to soften the bonds of acrylic paint in order to scrape it off. But this time, I stretched the wetted cloth out from a single point, creating ridges in it. Then, I scraped off paint selectively in the affected areas. The result suggested an explosion, upon which I elaborated.

Catastrophes like avalanches often start with a small disturbance. As the logistics of finance, commerce and war grow ever more complex, how robust is the feedback in human systems? It is an essential mystery that catastrophes happen. Ironically, the more the more finely-tuned and more efficient, the closer a system becomes to being very susceptible to catastrophic disruption. Very many of our systems are composed of a vast number of interlinked parts that may interact in totally unforeseen ways, as Fukushima shows. This is a new kind of accident that Yale professor Charles Perrow calls “normal accidents” where no one person is to blame.[25]

Figure 12. Emergence

Emergence: When a large variety of chemicals or other things are available, Stuart Kauffman and others declare that some will combine in a novel way to produce an effect that has an emergent property like photosynthesis. In the case of living organisms, though they do not disobey the laws of physics, neither can they be fully explained by them. Qualitatively, they constitute a new form of existence in their own right.[26]

Here, I discovered a new characteristic of my paints. When I tried to combine colors, say, purple on top of yellow, the paint crawled into biomorphic shapes. This painting discovery set me to contemplating emergence. (I later used the technique in Death Teems with Life). I developed the emergence concept by adding a lattice design, a group theory diagram.[27]

These paintings show that I have been attracted to “emergent phenomena” at certain boundaries. When I began painting the Essential Mysteries series in 1992, names for these ideas were unknown to me. In fact, chaos and complexity theory were flowering just then.

So many more mysteries remain to be painted and explored! It is humbling. At this stage of my life, this is best left to others. What has drawn me onward is what Einstein observed: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious—the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

Conclusion

The grand stage upon which we spend our lives has been immeasurably enlarged by research. It puts our personal stories in perspective. When we understand natural processes and why catastrophes generally happen, the world seems less inexplicable. Unsettling change surrounds us, yet knowing the universe is deeply orderly offers comfort. And it is cheerful to know that within the bounds of physical laws, even organic molecules can create novelty. All this has added meaning to my life.

I cannot finish without celebrating science as a centuries-long group endeavor to build an honest, useful and comprehensive picture of our world, and scientists’ humility to admit when “we just don’t know.” At its best, it counterbalances the dogmatism, the arrogance of power, and the outright mendacity that too often rules and corrodes societies.

New Concluding Remarks

During the Enlightenment, truth-telling and reasoning was brought to bear on politics. For instance, the checks and balances in our constitution were put there by men who had analyzed the history of tyranny well.

With the Quakers, I did service work in Philadelphia slums in the 1950s. Through them I developed a willingness to look under the facade of my society, analyzing what structures in the system protect some people and ignore or abuse others—another kind of truth-seeking. I have found especially valuable Quakers' special trainings in listening to people very unlike myself. Respect for truth is very allied with respect for each person.

In my life, I have sought out a great variety of people. I have emulated Studs Terkel, the oral historian, by keeping notes on personal stories from family members (some are now dead), Salvadoran refugee acquaintances, and exceptional friends of all sorts.  It’s another way of sensing where I am—in a society.

Science reinforces our understanding in this regard.  New DNA information links each of us to the rest of humankind, and traces it back to a common source in Africa. Research on brains and group behaviors is making us better able to see things through others' eyes. For instance, are juvenile offenders necessarily incorrigible? We now know that the prefrontal cortex, which helps them make good decisions, is still under development.

Jacob Bronowski’s classic, The Ascent of Man,  concludes by saying:

“Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional equipment working together as one has made the Ascent of Man.[27]

Appendix

The Essential Mysteries series was originally painted on circles of 114.3cm diameter Plexiglas (acrylic plastic sheet) 0.29cm thick. Lines or crystal patterns were inscribed through the paint, sometimes with a Dremel (small rotary power) tool. When displayed, they are lit from behind, either hung in a window or in front of a brightly-lit wall.

However, since the problem of back-lighting posed such problems, a limited edition of smaller archival prints has been made. These are also circular, but hang on the wall in the conventional manner.

References and notes

1. Philip Morrison, Powers of Ten: A book about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero. (New York: Scientific American Library, 1982) As an idea and a movie, this has gone through several iterations. The movie by designers Charles and Ray Eames was narrated by Philip Morrison.

2. Robert Hone, Red Hill Studios, San Anselmo, CA. Most recently, he has designed two interactive iPhone apps, Painting with Time and Painting with Time: Climate Change.

3. Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams,  The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering our extraordinary place in the cosmos (New York: Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Books, 2006)

"Ours is probably the first major culture in history with no shared picture of reality." p.4

"[T]he ancients took the cosmos—as they understood it—as the model for their lives and their religions."  p.7

"We need, collectively, to become the kind of people capable of using science to uphold a globally inclusive, long-lived civilization…[otherwise be] reviled as ignorant, selfish and hugely destructive if we do not." p. 296-7

4. Gertrude Myrrh Reagan, "An Artist Considers Levels in Matter," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 1, July 1990, pp. 35-40

5. Montessori, Maria, To Educate the Human Potential, The Clio Montessori Series, originally published, 1935

6. Peter Stevens, Patterns in Nature, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974), pp.4-5

7. Trudy Myrrh Reagan, "Why the Study of Patterns is Profound," Leonardo, Vol. 40, No. 3, June 2007, pp. 263-8

8. Benoit Mandelbrot, brochure accompanying The Fractal Geometry of Nature (NY and San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1977

9. The Large Hadron Accelerator at CERN in Europe.

10. Shinya Inoue and Kayo Okazasaki, "Biocrystals," Scientific American, April 1977, pp. 82-84,

11. Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe, the Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford University Press, 1995) p.20

12. Helena Curtis, The Marvelous Animals, An Introduction to The Protozoa (NY: Garden City, 1960) pp. 167-8

13. Anna Kuchment, staff editor, "The Smartest Bacteria on Earth," Scientific American, June 2011, pp.70-71

14. During the Vedic period (1200-900 BCE) recitations of rites invoked numbers as high as ten to the twelfth power. (Wikipedia).

15. Hubble image, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/farthest-galaxy.htmlprotogalaxies

16. "Ask an Astrophysicist," NASA website, nasa.gov

 In 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe. As instruments improve, the number grows.

17. The first experimental confirmation of neutrinos was in 1959. In 1998, the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan was the largest one to give results.

18. "Everything is Deeply Intertwingled," computer visionary Ted Nelson. I was privileged to hear Nelson give an informal talk at The Graphics Gathering in Palo Alto about 1983, where I heard his coinage.

19. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaïa, (NY, London: W.W. Norton, 1988) pp. 80-83

20. Lynn Margulis, and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?,  (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, Ltd, 1995) p.156

See further: James Lovelock, "The History of Gaia Theory," The Vanishing Face of Gaia" (NY: Basic Books, 2009) Chapt. 6

21. Roy Ascott, in a lecture for YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, 1989

22. Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? p. 84

23. Anna Kuchment, staff editor, "Swapping Germs," Scientific American, December 6, 2011

24. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (NY: Basic Books, 1984)

25. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, (NY: Anchor Books, 1996) p. 37, p. 29

26. Supplied by mathematics professor James Cannon of Brigham Young University.

27. Ascent of Man , Little, Brown & Co. Boston, 1973 pp. 429-438)

Glossary

Cosmic rays: Radiation from outer space that consists of subatomic particles. We also receive solar radiation.

Emergence: Fritjof Capra defines it as "At each level, the observed phenomena exhibit properties that do not exist at lower levels. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the organization of the whole."

Fukushima: The nuclear reactor plant destroyed by tsumani in 2011.

Neutrinos: Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference, neutrinos do not carry electric charge, making them able to pass through matter with almost no interactions. This makes them excruciatingly difficult to detect. Yet, they are ubiquitous.

Uncertainty Principle: The more one strives to determine an electon's position, the more one spoils possible knowledge of its velocity, and vice versa. Not simply a lack of detection apparatus, these are unknowable even in principle.

General source bibliography:

Buchanan, Mark, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, Three Rivers Press, 2001

Capra, Frijof, The Web of Life, Anchor, 1996

Carroll, Sean B., Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, W.W. Norton, 2005

Goodenough, Ursula, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, 1998

Pagels, Heinz, The Cosmic Code: Quantum physics as the language of nature, Simon & Schuster,1982

Waldrop, M.Mitchell, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge if Order and Chaos, Simon and Schuster, 1992

Fig. 1. Deep Yin and Yang, 1997

linoleum print, 57cm diameter

Fig. 2. The World of Small and Large, 1993, 114.3cm diameter acrylic painting on acrylic plastic sheet .29cm thick lines inscribed with Dremel tool, lit from behind.

Fig. 3.  An Essential Mystery: Number Governs Form, 1994, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, crystals engraved with Dremel tool, lit from behind

Fig. 4. An Essential Mystery: Energy Becomes Matter, 1997, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, lit from behind.

Fig. 5. An Essential Mystery: Life Creates, 1993, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, crystals engraved with Dremel tool, lit from

Fig. 6. An Essential Mystery: Brains Imagine, 1995,  114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, lit from behind.

Fig. 7. An Essential Mystery: Minds Have Wanderlust, 2007, 114.3cm diameter diameter painting on acrylic plastic, incised stars, lit from behind.

Fig. 8. An Essential Mystery: Intertwingled, 1997, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, lit from behind.

Fig. 9. An Essential Mystery: Death Teems with Life, 2003, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, lit from behind.

Fig. 10. An Essential Mystery: Synchrony Prevails, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, painted on both sides, lit from behind

Fig. 11. An Essential Mystery: Catastrophe, 2006, 114.3cm diameter painting on acrylic plastic, engraved spark traces with Dremel tool, small holes drilled to simulare sparks, lit from behind.

Fig. 12. Emergence, 2004, 119.4cm X 122cm paintinc on acrylic plastic, engraved lines with Dremel tool, lit from behind.

Bronowski, J., The Ascent of Man, Little, Brown & Co., 1973

Buchanan, Mark, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

Capra, Frijof Capra, The Web of Life, Anchor, 1996

Goodenough, Ursula, The Sacred Depths of Nature

Hwoschinsky, Carol: Listening with the Heart: A Guide for Compassionate Listening (Compassionate Listening Project)

Kaufmann, Stuart, Reinventing the Sacred: a New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan, What is Life? 1995

Pagels, Heinz, The Cosmic Code

Primack, Joel and Nancy Abrams,View from the Center of the Universe, Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2006

Montessori, Maria, To Educate Human Potential, 1935

Terkel, Studs, Hard Times

Waldrop, M.Mitchell, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge if Order and Chaos, Simon and Schuster, 1992