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To Catch a Rainbow Richard Jacob

As some of you know, in addition to my day job as a physicist, I was a semi-professional musician; that is to say, I gladly accepted payment for gigs. This often led, in conversational settings with new or casual acquaintances, to my collocutor, not wanting to discuss physics (I never blame them) resorting to the observation that many of their scientific friends, especially from the quantitative sciences, enjoy performing music avocationally, some of them quite well. I would agree; I have observed the same. And then, the new line of discussion apparently bearing fruit, they invariably go on to hypothesize that the reason must be that music—die holde Kunst—can be broken down to mathematical intervals and progressions, it being implied that of course scientists cannot possibly have truly artistic souls. Left brain, right brain and all that. At this point I would suddenly discover that I wanted an hors d’oeuvre from a tray across the room. But occasionally I would spend the time and patience to explain as best I could that it is in fact the other way around, at least for me and most of the musician scientists I know. It is our love of our science, whatever it may be, as an art form; of our work as an artistic endeavor; not its rigor, that expands our attention and efforts beyond that to which we are primarily dedicated. As the most iconic scientist of the Twentieth Century said, “After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.” (A. E.) Of course, the art of the scientist has always to satisfy the constraints of observation and logic, but this need be no barrier to beauty, imagination or the other aesthetic virtues. Maxwell’s equations governing electricity and magnetism are jaw-droppingly beautiful; Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, expressed mathematically, is awesome in its efficient simplicity, like a couplet from the world’s best-revered poet; the pictorial reconstruction from data of the collision of two gold atoms at speeds near that of light defies brush and pallet.

None of this is to assuage my frustration at an old pet peeve, but rather to introduce with pleasure to the faithful Emeritus Voices reader the extension of our usual art pictorial, featuring in each issue one of the Emeritus College’s graphic and performance artists, to the art of our scientist colleagues. Our first scientist cum artist is astronomer Paul Scowen. I hope his amazing photographs from the universe around us inspire you as they do me.

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But Scowen is not the only Paul, featured in this issue, to demonstrate the entanglement of the “two cultures.” Geologist Paul Knauth invites us along in his search for ever-clearer skies under which to search the heavens “for purely aesthetic reasons—I’m not doing any science.” And Harvey Smith is persuasive in his portrayal of mathematics as being much more than the cold consideration of numbers and equations. This larger than usual issue of Emeritus Voices (we seem to have emerged from our COVID cocoons) contains thoughtful analyses by Terry Bell on Lincoln’s effective interpretation of texts, in David Berman’s review of Arizona minorities’ battles for voting rights, Gretchen Bataille’s survey of changing patterns in higher education and Dirk Raat’s history of the Mormon pioneers’ interactions with Native Americans. Jeanie Brink reveals an episode in her retirement life, Lee Croft engages with a cold-war spy, Aleksandra Gruzinska recalls her years as a young Polish refugee living on a German farm during World War II and Jane and Paul Jackson describe a scary recent health crisis. Shannon Perry takes her grandson to London! Tally ho! David Kader moves us with his essay of short fragments derived from a consciousness of holocaust horror, and Ernie Stech draws an important lesson from another culture.

There is poetry to evoke a rainbow of emotions from Shannon, Perry, John Johnson, Babs Gordon and JoAnn Tongret; nostalgia from Tongret’s review of a favorite old movie and a suggestion or two by yours truly for reading the book behind that recent flick (or streaming the film from that book-club read.) Also check out Paul Jackson’s Golden Age of Hollywood impressions. And finally, I hope you like the new look of this, the 30th edition in Emeritus Voice’s fifteen-year existence. Fancy new clothes and accessories, many thanks to VisLab compositor, Megan Joyce.

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