Taking Delight in the Experience of Exploring a Mystery

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. ~Joseph Wood KrutchThe daughter of a friend, a girl with whom I used to roll down grassy hills, is in graduate school, putting the finishing touches on her studies in earth systems science (ESS). She spends much of her time in nature doing research. She does not spend her days fussing over atoms or genes. She refers to computational models, but doesn't see them as anything other than starting points or perhaps maps that may indicate reality, but are not reality. As she once told me, nature is far too complex to be "captured" by math.ESS is a new kind of science, one that takes a huge step back from the Western tradition of attempting to understand reality by disassembling it. It's not an offshoot of physics, biology, chemistry, or social science, but rather a coming together of all of them. Instead of reducing everything to their component parts, the science of complex systems embraces…