Notes From The Story Of Everything

Since humans began communicating—first with speech and later with drawings and written languages—we have tried to understand the world and our role in it. All cultures have invented stories to explain the origins, structure, and eventual fate of the universe. These encompass scriptures revealing the labors of a single omnipotent creator or a pantheon of deities, as well as countless other creation stories. Some traditions even hold that the world is supported on the back of a giant creature, such as an elephant or turtle. This quest for understanding continues today, as scientists hunt for elusive subatomic particles they believe will reveal whether the universe will expand forever because of the Big Bang or contract again into a Big Crunch eons from now.

Just as Raphael and Spada investigate these mysteries through their artworks, the exhibition of books and other items from the USC Libraries’ special collections represents another approach to telling the same story, the story of everything. The materials in Notes from the Story of Everything—which Raphael and Spada incorporated into their digital compositions—follow eighteen threads through our eternal questions about the cosmos. Themes of creation and destruction, harmony and strife, infinity and emptiness resonate in reflections by Newton, Einstein, Coleridge, Paracelsus, and Dame Rose Macaulay—as well as The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and images from the Hubble telescope. Their works represent many attempts—from diverse perspectives—to make sense of the universe.