Each of us is different and in other ways we are all the same. Sameness and difference are two sides of a coin; you can’t have one without the other. In our case, sameness and difference are the products of one billion years or more of ever-increasing animal complexity. At the present time, that complexity… Read the rest

Our American culture famously celebrates freedom of expression. Freedom of speech is invoked as a catch-all justification for the most hateful of sentiments; the ACLU, defender of the First Amendment, has gone to court to protect the right of Nazi’s to march publicly while displaying swastikas and… Read the rest

The word “woke” is getting lots of airtime these days. The GOP uses it derisively as an insult, indicating that woke is synonymous with leftist attitudes and beliefs about family, religion, patriotism, gender, and politics. In other words, that woke means liberal, and liberal means celebrating difference,… Read the rest

My wife and I just went to the movie Oppenheimer, about J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s well worth seeing, but prompted me to write about the other Oppenheimer, Robert’s brother Frank.

I met Frank Oppenheimer in the mid-seventies. He interviewed me for a job at the Exploratorium… Read the rest

According to the Big Bang theory, before the “bang” our universe was an infinitesimally small, non-dimensional singularity, a monad of the most basic and original substance or what the spiritually inclined call The Demiurge, The One or The Divine. From that perfect symmetry of wholeness emerged … Read the rest

Like any physical object used regularly, human bodies wear out; joints lose cartilage, cataracts develop, muscles get weaker, organs lose efficiency, healing happens slower, bones get more brittle, and memory…oh yes, memory gets worse. Now I remember.

The Watcher, the self-conscious “I” that … Read the rest

Neither of my parents were observant Jews. Yes, we belonged to a reform temple and would attend services there for the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, but other than that, we were mostly Jews in name only. We ate bagels, cream cheese, and lox, but also bacon; that about says it all.

My brother… Read the rest

While walking this past week I noticed whitish imprints on the bike path, the result of muddy water having collected under wet leaves that had dried once the sun came out and had blown away. Evanescent, such imprints will disappear quickly, and it got me thinking about what we leave behind.

Few of us will… Read the rest

We live in a time of specialization. Higher education for example, has primarily become a workplace on-ramp preparing top students to enter professional careers in which to specialize and make lots of money. Scholarship and acquiring knowledge for its own value has… Read the rest