Cartoons and Science and Other Essays

What connects a caricaturist’s exaggerated nose with a physicist’s law of falling bodies? Terada Torahiko sees in both an art of selecting what matters: an abstraction that can reveal truth more clearly than an exact copy of appearances.

These essays explore the currents of the Seto Inland Sea, early wireless communication, and the way our senses shape scientific knowledge. Reflections on agriculture, fisheries, and the teaching of experiments show how curiosity becomes practical work—and why mistakes can teach more than a polished demonstration.

Six brief pieces on cats bring the same eye to music, electricity, and a cat’s turn in midair. In the concluding story, Bulbs, an ailing scholar puzzles over an anonymous parcel. His increasingly elaborate explanations reveal how little even a keen mind can know of the world beyond itself.