Blaise Pascal. I can't find an artist credit for this, sorry.

I like this portrait of him, he looks a bit dreamy and mischievous, as though he is thinking of something delightful which he has no intention of sharing. I was going to write about his triangle, and the way it pops up in the most interesting of places; for instance, it predicts the ratio of signals generated by protons in the same chemical environment in a magnetic field when they are shielded and deshielded by vicinal protons and allowed to absorb energy at a given, specific radiofrequency. Somehow it's this which catches me, more so than when the triangle occurs elsewhere in nature, because there is nothing natural about this process: protons do not happen to be in a magnetic field without intent, nor do they absorb energy at a given radiofrequency unless someone exposes them to it.

None of this has to happen, and none of it does without a human hand making it be so. It's easy to slip into magical thinking here, because there is an aspect of magic in thinking of there being two events separated through long time -- the event of Blaise Pascal, his life, his mind, and the event of the development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy -- somehow being connected.

In actual fact, his triangle is not magic, it's a probability distribution. Perhaps that is what he is smiling about, here.