Scale also plays a critical role in poetry, both as metaphor and in form. Award-winning poet Linda Gregerson will read from her work and discuss the influence of her thinking about scale on her poems.

The concept of scale plays a critical role in physics. Not only the ingredients, but the laws of nature themselves change as we explore different length or energy scales. We will consider the notion of an effective theory, a formulation that includes only the effective degrees of freedom--those that are measurable with given tools--and how different such theories encapsulate the variations of physical descriptions with scale.

The talk treats one principal way that information is carried in time, namely through rhythmic pattern or periodic structure. It is a very simple exposition that treats African polymeter (a great remaining mystery to modern knowledge) in both music and African and Afro-Caribbean and African-American rhythmized textiles. (In architecture of course, as in the other spatial arts, scale is rarely thought of in terms of time, nor in the ways in which space can be expressed through intervals of succession; and yet this is the dimension necessary for experience and organization and order. While I will not be going into this at any point, while there may be enormous differences between very large and very small time scales, time itself (a la Bergson and the facts of biology) is not 'scalable.'