Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane Drinkwater

“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art.

Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens...