“Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dear child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound
Read for yourself. Draw for yourself. Write for yourself. Because these are ways of thinking. Ways to keep yourself sharp. It’s like physical exercise, you use it or lose it. It’s okay to be bad at it, especially at first. When you learn to draw, you’ll draw people all out of proportion the drawing will look jarringly, embarrassingly wrong in retrospect. You’ll look back at your work and cringe. But this is because you’re learning to see the mistakes, developing a trained eye. It’s evidence that you’re improving! It’s the same with writing, playing an instrument, taking up a sport or learning a martial art. You probably don’t have to do any of these specific things these days in order to make a living and survive. But thinking is thinking. Sharpening the mind is bound to yeild overall improvements in different aspects of your life. What do you have to lose, an hour or two a day you might otherwise spend doomscrolling, or passively consuming increasingly artificially generated content? Interacting with things that no one could be bothered to create themselves with any kind of mindfulness? Take just a little time away from that and read a book chapter. Draw a self portrait in the mirror. Write someone a letter on a peice of paper and send it. Call it a form of therapy. Set aside some time to think for yourself.
At the time of this writing, in 2025, it has been a little over a decade since legislative programs started popping up in various states to promote STEAM education. “STEAM’, the incorporation of arts into ‘STEM’ (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), was as much an admission as a new concept. It was an admission that something was being lost in our zeal to produce American scientists, engineers and computer programmers to boost our national competitiveness in an increasingly technocratic world, namely the arts and humanities. Before getting into the subject of what art education has to offer the sciences and vice versa), it’s worth taking a look at the tension that exists between the arts and humanities and STEM subjects in general.
During my time at UF, I encountered a dismissive attitude towards the humanities among some science and engineering majors. They viewed any required humanities courses as an onerous waste of time, and degrees in the humanities as a flat-out waste of resources. The internet would eventually produce a derogatory moniker for such people: STEM lords. I was repelled by the STEM lord attitude, and I weighed in on the debate in a letter to the student newspaper that made it into print, appealing to the ideal of the ‘Renaissance man’ and arguing that figures like Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci would hardly approve of such a narrow view of education.
Several semesters after I began teaching organic chemistry, I was approached by a pair of former students who wanted me to serve as the faculty advisor and sponsor of their student club. This club would be called Art for All, and although it was open to the entire student body, its purpose was to give overstressed pre-health and STEM majors a creative outlet through visual art. I rediscovered my lost love of art through this club, and I decided that wherever my career went, making visual art would always have a prominent place in my life. During our weekly meetings, in which we would simply draw and paint, I witnessed the emotional strain that students in these challenging science majors were under, and the therapeutic value of creative pursuits. I also confirmed what I had long suspected, that my experience of being discouraged from pursuing a creative career was all too common. How many frustrated artists, musicians, poets and writers are out there doing fine and important work in medicine, information technology, engineering and basic science research but feeling like their life’s true passion has been relegated mere hobby status, if they were able to stay connected to it at all?
The question of what the arts can substantially offer to the education and practice of science is a separate issue from this tragedy of lost creative fulfillment. But it is connected, because it’s the thwarted creatives working and teaching in STEM fields who are in the unique position to be able to realize and maximize the benefits of such offerings. Who better to apply the lessons of art to science than those scientists who are artists at heart?
Axiom One: The rows of the periodic table describes the filling of electrons into valence shells around the nucleus, with each element having a unique electron configuration in its hypothetical isolated ‘ground state’.
Axiom Two: Atoms in a molecule form covalent bonds as to seek a filled valence shell of electrons for each atom in the molecule.
Axiom Three: Atoms in a molecule also form covalent bonds as to seek a neutral charge balance (protons versus electrons) in the vicinity of each atom in the molecule.
Much of our understanding of molecular structure and chemical reactivity can be derived from these basic principles.
This is a place to entertain my thoughts on science education, art and philosophy. More importantly, it’s a means of forcing myself to begin to write and share my writing regularly. Here I will be sketching out half-formed ideas and refining projects I have too long left on the back burner. I’ll be indulging my various interests without worrying too much about them getting mixed together. This will be my space to write as if no one is reading.
The Model Kit 