Edited by author 03-14-2001 11:09 AM
emailed-date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 13:16:07 -0500 [reposted in QuickTopic by permission]

There's something visceral about seeing this webpage bounce around mailing lists. An intangible tremor, preserved in the most delicate of media. It could have been created centuries ago. Had it appeared in the day of Benjamin Franklin or John Keats, they might have travelled to see it, a unique symbol, one of their rare peeks through the natural world's keyhole to see a million-to-one conjunction of science and art.

The tracing might have inspired poetry or commentary on the beauty and power of Nature which we might still read today. What would it have been like in that alternate universe for us to go browse in a used-book shop, and happen upon this same sand design, now preserved only in words, leaving us to wonder what it must have looked like, how beautiful and elegant it must have been, and what clicked in those great minds as they mused over it?

Instead millions of people are seeing the thing itself, a simple, wondrous dish of clockworked sand, thrown from a tabletop in Seattle to every continent on Earth. What we have that Keats lacked! And what he had that we'll never know!