Werner Heisenberg Falls in Love — the love letters of the Nobel-winning pioneer of quantum mechanics and originator of the uncertainty principle.

Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted generations and transformed the world: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Emily Brontë, Anaïs Nin,  (pictured above), and more.

Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr on subjective vs. objective reality and the uses of religion in a secular world. 

The late, great Ursula K. Le Guin on art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem. 

Behold the oldest known telescope in America, circa 1640, held at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. For temporal perspective, it was made in the final years of Galileo’s life, just after he unsettled the universe with his landmark treatise Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Attributed to an unknown Italian telescope crafter and made of leather, pasteboard, and glass, it is one of only twenty surviving telescopes made prior to 1650. 

Complement with the story of the landmark detection of gravitational waves — the greatest breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo first pointed his crude telescope (not unlike this one) at the heavens, then revisit the world’s oldest pencil and oldest computer.

(HT Chicago Design Museum)

The great neurologist Oliver Sacks on the building blocks of personhood and how narrative threads our identity together. 

Ooh. There is now a PBS show based on Salvador Dalí’s rare, erotic vintage cookbook. 

Marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the modern environmental movement, on writing and the loneliness of the creative life. 

Astrophysicist Janna Levin, author of the spectacular Black Hole Blues, takes us on a thrilling tour of black holes – the supreme mystery of the universe, revolutionary to our understanding of reality. Premiering tonight at 9/8c, Black Hole Apocalypse is the first program hosted by a woman in PBS’s 44-year history of Nova science documentaries. Rejoice the revolution. 

This Book Is a Planetarium — a pop-up masterpiece translating the laws of physics into playful and poetic tangibility, from the wildly inventive Kelli Anderson. 

Alan Watts, born on this day in 1915, on the art of presence.