Nature’s Depths

Walking through nature with John Palka, a neuroscientist who loves plants and ponders big questions

Rumination

Friendship in Science

Rumination

Scientists have a reputation of being solitary and introverted, their labs functioning as isolated silos and their teams driven by competition. However, friendship and collaboration are at least as important, as are shared passions outside the world of science.

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The Trees and I

Rumination

In the mid-1970s I had a remarkable experience while walking in ancient forests on the west side of the Cascade Mountains of Washington. . . I was grasping an essential truth that was based on familiar science (relating to genes), but the nature of the grasping had a quality that I was not able to put into words, and that, even if I could, a scientific journal would probably never allow to be published on its pages.

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John Palka Olympic Panorama

To See a World in a Grain of Sand

Rumination

To see a world in a grain of sand—to peer so deeply into the nature of any one thing that the riches of the Universe begin to be revealed—that to me is the essence of science as a quest. Not as a profession or a career, not as a niche in complex modern society, but as a quest for understanding one’s deepest nature… I hope that the words and pictures that you will find on these posts will convey some of the joy and exhilaration that I have found on my own quest to peer beneath the surface of the natural world.

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