Understanding as an art - by Laura Deming - Barnacles

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I was 11, in the kitchen of our house in New Zealand, explaining a concept from ‘Molecular Biology of the Cell’ to my dad. Cynthia Kenyon had given the book to me, so it was a scared object. There was an illustration, David Goodsell-style, of molecules crowded inside a cell. I’d never heard of that before - they were all so jam-packed, right on top of each other! What a riotous place! My heart stopped. These molecules were really there. I was looking at an illustration but it was real, it was telling me about a real place, that place was just as real as my world except smaller. Something broke in my brain. I felt flooded with awe. I was there. I saw it. For a moment, I was somewhere else. Many works talk about traveling to other scientific worlds - for example, Tim Urban illustrates this perfectly in ‘The Big and the Small’. But what no one ever told me about, when I was a kid, was how you can inhabit them - I always thought these worlds described in textbooks (imagine you’re on a star

I'll never forget the first time I entered a different world. I was 11, in the kitchen of our house in New Zealand, explaining a concept from ‘Molecular Biology of the Cell’ to my dad. Cynthia Kenyon had given me the book, so it was a sacred object. I was pointing to a David Goodsell-style illustration of molecules crowded inside a cell. I’d never seen anything like it - they were all so jam-packed, right on top of each other! What a riotous place! My heart stopped. These molecules were really there. I was looking at an illustration, but it was telling me about a world just as real as my…

Understanding as an art - by Laura Deming - Barnacles

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