It is perhaps telling that I find the lands and waters I helped to protect to be more gratifying than the scores of papers I published on laser-surface interactions and nanophotonics while at the Naval Research Laboratory, though I couldn't imagine a better profession for my genes than physics. While experiencing the diminished faculties of a septuagenarian, at the time of this writing I nonetheless stay busy-as-a-snail with the physics of sloshing "internal waves" that occur at the submerged interface between warm and cold waters in the Finger Lakes.

I've been tugged by the arts since playing an instrument in youth. But horizons broadened dramatically when I had the good fortune to take a history of art class from a legendary professor at Case Institute of Technology, the enthusiastic Harvey Buchanan, and later to stumble into a modern dance concert at The Ohio State University. Asking myself ‘What the hell is a dance concert?,’ I came away astonished. Later, as a diversion from the intensity of graduate school at the University of Illinois, I donned tights to sample modern dance, and later obsessed as a tardy entrant to ballet with the Ithaca Ballet, and then with small companies in the D.C. area.

After aging out of dance, tinkering in the arts lagged when work escalated to require travel to the National Synchrotron Light Source on Long Island, where the group I worked with operated a beamline. But a lull in operations allowed me to slip-in a continuing ed course at the Corcoron School of Art and Design, back when it was associated with the now tragically dispersed Corcoron Gallery of Art. By chance, the professor was Slaithong Schmutzhart, whose charming sculptures had earlier captivated me.

When considering a banner for this page, a photo of our galaxy mirrored in a pond squirming with life mysteriously emerged from the thought ether. Perhaps it suggests the cosmic reflections that increasingly intrude upon later life. One starting point might be the Devonian shales that line the famed gorges of the Finger Lakes. The setting shouts geology. Heeding the call to learn more lends the long view. Life on earth began nearly four billion years ago, when the planet was young, and has but a billion more to go, when the sun's increasing luminosity boils off the oceans. Human kind -- or whatever species evolves from us, if we are so lucky to last so long -- will surely succumb long before. We--and the life in that pond--are comprised of elements forged in the galaxy's exploding and colliding stars, one of which sustains us, but only to engulf us eventually in its funeral pyre. The entire enterprise seems pointless. But when a sentient organism, hard-wired for eusociality, confronts this fact, it must in the end conclude that the present life and all that sustains it, from the biosphere to the social sphere, is all that can really matter. It behooves us to take care.