Karen Luper lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a book exploring the beauty, betrayals, and dismissed questions of science. “Magnet” is her first published work and is an excerpt from a larger work in progress.
Fall 2016: The Poetics of Science
Magnet
When the number zero had not been invented, when quantities themselves were represented by lines or by pebbles arranged in patterns like those found on dice or dominoes . . . when the composition of matter was thought variously to be based in water, air, or fire...