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What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

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Below the Mesh

The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.

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The Finite Lens: How a Fragile Life Gives Shape to an Infinite Universe

The question arrives early and stays late: what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life inside an infinite, eternal universe? Every serious person encounters this problem, usually around the age when the body first betrays its limits, and no one resolves it cleanly. Theology dissolves the question by denying its premise. Science measures the mismatch with such precision that the human side of the equation vanishes into decimal places. And the popular existentialist answers, the ones printed on coffee mugs and quoted in commencement speeches, have been sanded down so thoroughly that they function as anesthesia rather than analysis.

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The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

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The People We Cannot See: What Dark Matter Galaxies Tell Us About Invisible Life

In February 2026, astronomers confirmed the existence of a galaxy called CDG-2 that is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Sitting in the Perseus galaxy cluster some 300 million light-years from where you are reading this sentence, CDG-2 is 99% dark matter. It was not found by its starlight, because it has almost none. It was found by four globular clusters huddled together in the dark, gravitational orphans clinging to the skeleton of a galaxy that had its visible substance stripped away by the gravitational violence of its neighbors. A month earlier, researchers announced Cloud-9, a spherical gas cloud near the spiral galaxy Messier 94, only 2,000 light-years away, that contains no stars at all. Not a single one. Scientists called it a “failed galaxy,” a primordial dark matter structure that never accumulated enough material to ignite. Two discoveries, two different failure modes, and the same unsettling implication: the visible universe, the one we photograph and celebrate and write poetry about, is a thin bright residue stretched across an architecture we cannot see and have only begun to understand.

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The Risk of Erasing History with Ignorance

In the annals of time, history stands tall as an undying repository of deeds, triumphs, failures, and fables that have defined humanity’s trajectory. It is with a tinge of dismay, and a hint of alarming concern, that we discuss the burgeoning contempt for history against the people who dare not to know. We’re not just combating ignorance; we’re fighting an unfortunate relegation of the past to the inconsequential.

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Rise of the Divine White

The Covid Pandemic released a vicious wave of cordoned hatred that has been brewing in America since the Civil War: The Divine White. That invented birthright has been vigorously defended, and consumed with contempt for the foreign, and hatred for the unsimilar, and that bile has bubbled beneath the veneer of civility, decorum, and democracy — always dangerous, but evidently nascent in daily public purgings — that is until, 150 years later, when an American president came to glory on the heels, and the cruel deficits of, a rabid, and deadly, gang of sycophants who placed personality, and ego, above the law, and beneath contempt.

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Pro GMO

As a two-decades long Vegan, I do my best to eat the right things, live the right way, and participate in the right fights. I am, however, confounded by the anti-GMO reactions of some people who claim to want to live a better, healthier, life. GMO — Genetically Modified Organisms — has been the prime directive of the food chain in America, and the world, for centuries. The anti-GMO-ers remind me of the anti-vaxxers who refuse to recognize the successful results of science, and technology, only because the facts do not support their paranoid worldview.

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Science Park: A Last Look Around Pau

Pau is a small provincial city, it has long been a haven for the British wanting to escape Blighty for the good of their health. There are many spas in the area and the climate is reputed to be good for your health. The older architecture is a mix of “alpine’ grand villa and a good dose of British garden. There is a cathedral and a university and the small provincial airport is now opening up to fulfill Pau’s emerging status as the gateway to the Pyrenees.

The airport’s development and the expansion of the scientific departments at the University have led to the development of a science park on the outskirts of the city.  I have, on past visits, caught tantalizing glimpses of some of the buildings and was determined to explore further before we left Pau for good.

After one particularly frustrating afternoon, I declared a time out and went exploring and headed straight for the science park.

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Celebrating Canadian Space Oddity Commander Chris Hadfield

I have been following Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s journey in space for some time now, and on May 13th, he stepped down from his command of the International Space Station. He has been on the artificial satellite since December 2012, when he arrived as part of Expedition 35, a six-person crew.

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