Flourishing consists of positive emotion, meaning, engagement, healthy relationships, and accomplishment – the success of a life well lived. The acronym is “PERMA”. This is the characterizing feature of Nettle’s third and ultimate level of happiness. Don’t focus on negative things; focus on the positive, and you will flourish. [attributed to Alek Wek] Human well-being is not a random phenomenon….
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Value for Wednesday of Week 12 in the season of Sowing
Investigating – Experimenting
Curiosity and inquisitiveness lead us into the domain of action, where we investigate and experiment.
- All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
- No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. [attributed to Albert Einstein]
- Despite advances achieved through objective scientific investigation, and the breaking down of long-standing fears and superstitions, the world is still not a reasonable place. Many attempts to make it so have failed because of selfish individual and national interests. [Jacque Fresco]
Having embarked on the quest to know, we actively investigate by experimentation and other means. We are now fully engaged in the world as it is, employing secondary processes such and reason and logic to satisfy the longing to know. As we do the tangible, day-to-day laboratory work of investigation, keep the primary processes that reside in the imagination nearby. We will need them to achieve our creative potential.
Of course, experimentation is essential to science. “Experimental research is an essential cornerstone of scientific progress, illuminating the dark corridors of knowledge and uncovering the hidden mysteries of the world around us.” “Inquiry-based science teaching (IBST) has garnered considerable interest in recent years due to its ability to improve students’ comprehension of scientific ideas and procedures. Experiments are crucial in IBST since they are key instruments for promoting inquiry, investigation, and discovery in the classroom.” Educators have developed a “5D” model for students’ scientific investigation, which consists of: “1. Deciding what and how to measure, observe, and sample; 2. Developing or selecting procedures/tools to measure and collect data; 3. Documenting and systematically recording results and observations; 4. Devising representations for structuring data and patterns of observations; and 5. Determining if (1) the data are good (valid and reliable) and can be used as evidence, (2) additional or new data are needed, or (3) a new investigation design or set of measurements are needed.”
Real
True Narratives
Science as investigation:
- Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): a history of how eighteenth-century astronomers “traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon” and thereby understand the solar system.
- David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005), “tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure . . .”
- Marcus Chown, A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came In From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage (Apollo, 2025), “tells the stories of scientists on the quest to demystify black holes . . .”
Investigating history:
- Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019), “draws upon court transcripts, unpublished reports and Lizzie’s recently discovered letters to tell the story chronologically, from murder to verdict to the case’s long, strange afterlife.”
- Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper, 2019): “The people who live there, seemingly magically marooned in a tropic Arcadia in the middle of a vast oceanic nowhere: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how?”
- Simon Heffer, The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain, 1880 to 1914 (Pegasus, 2021): “. . . he does not rely just on secondary literature and makes excellent use of wide-ranging archival research. That approach gives the book a fresh perspective.”
- Joel Warner, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History (Crown Publishing, 2023), “chronicles four months of depravity involving multiple victims in a remote castle. Sade wrote in secret, by candlelight, covering the scroll in microscopic script. When he was suddenly transferred to a mental asylum days before revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in 1789, he hid his unfinished scroll in a crevice of his cell wall.”
- Gregory J. Wallance, Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia (St. Martin’s Press, 2023): “convincingly portrays him as one of the 19th century’s most influential journalists, arguing that ‘Siberia and the Exile System,’ his account of his 1885-86 journey, was what first soured American relations with Russia.”
- Kate Winkler Dawson, The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025): “Her real purpose here is to shear off the moralizing drapery of 19th-century literary language, submit the facts of the victim’s cruel fate to journalistic scrutiny and mull the forensic tools, like ‘CCTV footage, GPS coordinates, even Fitbit data,’ that might have convicted Avery, had they existed.”
Investigative journalism:
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), “the third person narrative by the two Washington Post reporters whose investigative reporting earned their paper a Pulitzer Prize, is a detective story. It turns Watergate into a fast‐moving mystery, a whodunit written with ease, if not elegance.”
- Paul Pringle, Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Los Angeles (Celadon Books, 2022): “Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism, explaining how a reporter wrestles information and documents from reluctant sources and government officials.”
- Matthew Schwartz, Confessions of an Investigative Reporter (Keohler Books, 2020).
- John Pilger, ed., Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs (Jonathan Cape, 2004).
- James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (University of Missouri Press, 2006).
- Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers About Their Craft (Vintage Press, 2005): “In the three decades since Tom Wolfe anthologized a group of writers under the rubric ‘New Journalism’ and identified them as rivals to the best novelists of their time, a next wave has been gathering. Robert S. Boynton calls this movement the New New Journalism, and he interviews 19 of its leading practitioners in his book of the same name.”
Experimenting in the abstract:
- Jason McBride, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker (Simon & Schuster, 2022): “Kathy Acker — proto-punk, tough-stemmed flower, ransacker of texts, literary heir to William S. Burroughs and Gertrude Stein, sex worker, loather of establishments, striver for maximum impudence . . . slowly built a vital and subversive body of work that erased the distinctions between fiction, poetry and nonfiction.”
- George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008): “Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.” “. . . a book that did justice to the work of the AACM would have to move beyond a project of vindication, and would have to include more than just the voices of musicians.”
- David Nicholls, American Experimental Music 1890-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1990): “From the end of the nineteenth century a national musical consciousness gradually emerged in the United States as composers began to turn away from the European conventions on which their music had been modeled. It was in this period of change that experimentalism was born and America subsequently became, as it still is, a major source of new musical ideas for European musicians.”
- C. Renée James, Things That Go Bump in the Universe: How Astronomers Decode Cosmic Chaos (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023): “ . . . the astronomer C. Renée James writes about what we can learn from the more exotic shapes and sounds in outer space.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Experimental science:
- Philip Ball, Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
- Deborah G. Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
- W.I.B. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation (W.W. Norton & Company, 1957).
- Bernhard Dürken, Experimental Analysis of Development (1932).
Experimental thinking:
- James N. Druckman, Experimental Thinking: A Primer on Social Science Experiments (in pdf format) (Cambridge University Press, 2022): “In some ways, I have been writing this book for much of my life. At an early age, my mom, Marj Druckman, taught me how to systematically address problems and think about them from multiple angles. Meanwhile, my dad, Dan Druckman, exposed me to the social sciences and taught me how to think about experiments.” [the author, from p. 7 of the Acknowledgements section]
- James N. Druckman, Donald P. Greene, James H. Kuklinski and Arthur Lupia, eds., Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Bradley David Tuggle, Intricate Movements: Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser (Routledge, 2019): “. . . late sixteenth-century English poets found some remarkably radical ways to interrogate and redefine the status of humans.”
- Eugen Fischer and John Collins, eds., Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism: Rethinking Philosophical Method (Routledge, 2015): “Eugen Fischer and John Collins have brought together an impressive, and important, series of essays concerning the methodological debates between rationalists and naturalists, and how these debates have been impacted by work in experimental philosophy.” They “claim that the perennial divide between rationalism and naturalism has been ‘radically reshaped . . . through the advent of experimental philosophy'”
Experimental art:
- Sandra Cerny Minton and Rima Faber, Thinking with the Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016): “Each chapter in the book addresses thought processes in dance by: describing the processes, explaining the brain networks involved, providing connections to academic classroom pedagogy, applying the information to movement and dance, and guiding the reader through movement explorations and improvisations pertinent to each process.”
- James Saunders, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Routledge, 2009): “. . . part one consists of nine chapters exploring issues central to experimental music, while part two documents the work of contemporary figures to demonstrate a broad scope of practices and possibilities.”
- Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture (Routledge, 6th edition, 2020), “presents an extensive history of electronic music—from its historical beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its everchanging present—recounting the musical ideas that arose in parallel with technological progress. In four parts, the author details the fundamentals of electronic music, its history, the major synthesizer innovators, and contemporary practices.”
- Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Routledge, 2nd edition, 1999).
- Riccardo D. Wanke, Sound in the Ecstatic-Materialist Perspective on Experimental Music (Routledge, 2022).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels about investigating:
- Victor Suthammanont, Hollow Spaces: A Novel (Counterpoint, 2025): “John Lo, the only Asian American partner at his law firm, is acquitted of the murder of his colleague (and extramarital girlfriend) Jessica DeSalvo. After the trial, his marriage implodes; his two children, Brennan and Hunter, arrive at different conclusions about his guilt; and no one seems to care who killed Jessica if John didn’t. . . . Three decades later, Brennan and Hunter — a litigator and a war correspondent, respectively — decide to confront that mystery, which Suthammanont unspools with gorgeous precision.”
- Ian McEwan, What We Can Know: A Novel (Knopf, 2025): By the 22nd century, civilization as we know it has collapsed. “A scholar, Thomas Metcalfe — his period of study is 1990 to 2030 — becomes interested in a 2014 dinner party in rural England during which a great, irascible, vaguely Philip Larkin-like poet, Francis Blundy, read aloud ‘A Corona for Vivien’ and dedicated it to his wife. . . the only copy . . . disappears. Over the decades, the missing poem’s reputation has grown. . . . It may be buried. Metcalfe and his on-again, off-again lover and later wife, a scholar named Rose, decide to search for it.”
Poetry
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
In any era, new music illustrates the virtue of investigation and experimentation of musical forms. To the modern ear, the music of composers such as Kurt Weill, Hans Haass, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Alois Hába, Dieter Schnebel, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Friedrich Cerha, Luciano Berio, Rolf Liebermann, Cristóbal Halffter, Henri Pousseur, Mauricio Kagel, Rolf Riehm, Brian Ferneyhough, Hanspeter Kyburz, Iannis Xenakis, Vinko Globokar, Pierre Schaffer, Pierre Henry, Michaël Levinas, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Karlheinz Scockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Andreas Raseghi, Wolfgang Rihm and Johannes Kalitzke will more than adequately illustrate the point. Works by these and other twentieth-century composers have been offered on a superb compilation of performances at a music festival in Donauschingen, a small town in southwest Germany: the CD compilation is called “75 Jahre Danaueschinger Musiktage - 1921-1966”. The festival has continued, as represented here from 2001, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023.
New music has reached into eclectic popular culture. Leading figures in this movement include:
- Jambinai, is a Japanese group with a substantial playlist and set of releases. Its albums include “apparition” (2022) (27’), “ONDA” (2019) (51’), “A Hermitage” (2016) (47’), and “Différance” (2012) (45’). Here they are live at Trans Musicales de Rennes in 2014.
- Sarah Davachi (b. 1987, Canada) is a composer and performer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. She has an extensive playlist.
Compositions:
- Ernest John Moeran, Fantasy Quartet for Oboe and Strings (1946) (approx. 13-15’) (list of recorded performances): “Formally, Moeran’s Fantasy was in a trajectory from the largely-forgotten instrumental ‘Fancy’ from before the time of Purcell and revived with great success in the early 20th century by Walter Willson Cobbett.”
Albums:
- Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, “Down a Rabbit Hole” (2018) (51’) “tells a new story with each carefully composed piece. . . In her compositions, her visionary melodic and harmonic concepts are executed with precision by her long-established band . . .”
- Eunmi Ko & CAMP, “12 Views on Life” (2024) (93’) is “full of musical experiments . . .”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Kate Bush, “Experiment IV” (lyrics)
- Freezepop, “Science Genius Girl” (lyrics)
