Vertimus

Today, I had the privilege to meet Roald Hoffman in his office on Baker lab, thanks to a common friend from Sweden.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U.S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

“Applied theoretical chemistry” is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. The pedagogical perspective is very strong in his work.

Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he participated, for example, in the production of a television course in introductory chemistry titled “The World of Chemistry,” shown widely since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, Chemistry Imagined with artist Vivian Torrence, The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine (translated into six languages), New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt.

Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed three years later by Gaps and Verges, then Memory Effects (1999), Soliton (2002), and most recently, in Spanish, Catalista. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled Oxygen, which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. A second play by Roald Hoffmann, Should’ve, had its initial workshop production in Edmonton, Canada in 2006.

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Discussions around representations, art and science of course !

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then walk around the Beebe lake and back to Bradfield Hall while recording some sample of soils with the accelerometer right down, on site.

The rhizotron moved to the first floor, under uv lights. In the recipient are growing a mix of sunflower and beans seed.

On the corridor, the windows shows the different types of soil.

 

 

 

Greg Mc Laskey succeeded in setting batteries to the accelerometer, this monday I made the first test in the workshop….while they where doing earthquakes .

 

 

 

 

 

 

I go then directly to the botanical garden garden to make the first test : I can hearworms woodlouses, collembolus. But I still have to make some adjustments to get better recordings before it’s too cold outdoor.

Busy afternoon after a nice walk on the cascadilla trail with Karen Houle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Third and last fungi for the Ag Quad

 

Karen Houle and Johannes Lehmann, breakfast around art and sciences issues, the diverse and necessary inter-connections. Mapping the possibilities with open minds.

While the rhizotron is standing under the UV lights from Bradfield Hall ground floor, Shiyi and I finished the first future sounded fungi and starting the second one.

This one is a fungi-landscape, with wild herbs from the river shore near the wild flowers garden included in the soil- papier maché .