You walk along a forest path, the leaf litter compressing underfoot, when a flash of white catches your eye. You crouch down to look: rising up through the brown debris is a cluster of five pale translucent flowers, their necks bent towards the earth. The ghost pipe flower, its lack of colouring revealing its parasitic nature — rather than receiving its energy from the sun, it insinuates itself into the fungal web running through the soil and extracts the nutrients which the fungi have received from the photosynthesizing trees whose roots they join. You stand again, hand on an oak for balance, the microbiome of your palm exchanging with that of its bark. As you raise your eyes, tracing the imagined mycelial tendrils, you notice a car-sized boulder between two trunks and deep time floods your awareness. This erratic was dropped here tens of thousands of years ago by a glacier which carved this topography, and the lichen which mottle its surface will digest it into soil for tens of thousands more. Stepping closer, your visual field fills with the lichen’s intricate complexity, its fractal geometry invoking the branching of your lungs and the nearby river delta, a geometry whose study grew up alongside the development of computers, those telescopes into the mathematical realm which reveal structures of a complexity beyond the reach of the unaided mind. Structures whose infinite folds form the boundaries of future outcomes in the state-space of the atmosphere, thwarting attempts at long-term weather prediction, making this cloudless day a surprise and a gift. Your mind comes back to earth, to the smell of pine and to this moment. You continue forward…
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Orbital Studies Magazine is a print-first publication featuring beautifully crafted and poetically attuned writing and visual art engaging with science, nature, math, technology, and the philosophy that relates them.
Readers of Orbital Studies Magazine are literate and numerate. Their interest draws them beneath the fastest-paced layers of culture towards slower processes of more substance. They are broadly curious, but still discerning. Where they are critical, they are not dismissive. They care about beauty, but are suspicious of trends. They appreciate seriousness but are mindful of elitism.
They live in a world where the "Two Cultures" of the arts and sciences, of nature and culture, are not separate, but orbit and attract each other in the space of ideas. They recognize that the most groundbreaking science has been informed by philosophy and the most meaningful philosophy has been informed by science, aspiring to a rigorous relationship with both of these worlds.
Orbital Studies Magazine is somewhere between a science magazine and a literary journal. We love the science writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, and of Carlo Rovelli. In fiction we love Borges, Ted Chiang, and Benjamin Labatút. We read writers that slow us down and draw us into presence like Jenny Odell and David Abram. Jan Zwicky’s philosophy opens the aperture of our mind. We are inspired by the tool-building art of Bret Victor and Max Bittker. We are subscribers of Quanta Magazine and Brick, Noema and Aeon, Are.na Annual, Emergence Magazine, and Nautilus.
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