"A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'"
"In Traversal, this incredibly interdisciplinary exploration of knowledge and meaning gets to grow across 600 pages. Whether she is writing about colonialist explorer James Cook, crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin or novelist Mary Shelley, about poetry, abolitionism or paint, Popova has a way of weaving one story into the next as if the boundaries between disciplines, cultures and centuries do not exist."
An expansive interdisciplinary narrative links science, literature, history and art to pursue questions of human purpose. Biographical vignettes of figures such as James Cook, Dorothy Hodgkin and Mary Shelley illustrate continuity between exploratory science, technological discovery and cultural expression. The account treats knowledge as porous across disciplines, showing astronomical expeditions, crystallographic breakthroughs and literary imagination as facets of collective curiosity. Themes of colonialism, abolitionism and artistic practice appear alongside scientific method to reveal complex entanglements of power, creativity and understanding. The tone champions polymathy and insists that integrated knowledge offers deeper insight into why human beings seek meaning across disparate scales of time and space.
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