Although winter is cold, I find myself in the heat of it this morning.

I’m really mired down in Frank Wilczek’s book ‘A Beautiful Question’. So far it is a wonderful meditation in the history of physics and philosophy. At the beginning of the book, Wilczek clearly states his question in which the title alludes to: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” (1). A paragraph later he clarifies the question by posing this one: “Is the world a work of art?”

This is not a book review, but rather a meditation of my own. In a chapter specifically about Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell and their work with electromagnetism and it’s connection to light, Wilczek shares a a personal thought that he has while writing his book:

“Before we move on to Maxwell’s equations themselves, I’d like to share a fantasy that occurred to me while preparing this chapter.

Imagine that a race of spiders arose, so intelligent that they begin to construct spider physics. What would that be like?

Spiders have poor vision, so they would not begin from the starting point that our visual perception suggests to us: a world of unconnected objects free to move within a receptacle, space. Instead, a spider’s sensory universe is based on touch. More specifically, spiders sense vibrations of the strand of their webs, and from those vibrations they infer the existence of objects that cause them (especially, potential meals). For intelligent spiders, to conceive of lines of force would require no great leap of imagination. Force-conducting, space-filling webs are how they make their living. Their world is a world of connections and vibrations.” (129).

I immediately thought of our dear friend the tree while considering this passage. Namely, how a tree’s sensory world is also (take a chance with me) based on touch. That is to say, a tree can feel sunlight, which it processes and turns into energy. Light, in a sense, is a vibration of electromagnetism. And, therefore, the tree and the spider have similar conceptions of the forces they feel when we look at the things they build. They are both artists in my eyes. Or maybe, works of art themselves.

Consider this: although it could be totally ironic, compare a spider’s web to the cross section of a tree. And focus on the design.

Just as a spider utilizes it’s web to experience the world, so to does the tree utilize it’s wood. The tree, in a sense, uses light to build it’s wood. It’s how the tree makes it’s living. Light, in a sense, is inseparable from electromagnetism so far as in the lines of force that they are transported along. Can it be that wood and the way in which it is build translates into the same deep design where light and electromagnetism originate? And how does this affect tree growth, and more intuitively, tree architecture?

These are relatively large questions rattling around in my head at the moment. This concept of deep design is quite fascinating, and it’s great fun to make connections between things in the natural world. Spiders and trees, ha!