inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to
elicit a certain mental state in the viewer. Today, in his fifties, Taylor
is positively da Vincian in his range of pursuits—besides his day job
in nanoparticle physics, he is also a painter and photographer with
two art degrees—but his long, curly hair looks more Newtonian. His
hair is so remarkable that the University of Oregon, where he works,
once Photoshopped it out of a publication. Perhaps the marketing
department considered it a distraction, as Eugene isn’t exactly known
for conservative dress standards. Come to think of it, my high school
physics teacher had exactly this hairstyle. Must be a thing.
Taylor never lost his interest—obsession, really—in Jackson
Pollock. While at the Manchester School of Art, he built a rickety
pendulum that splattered paint when the wind blew because he wanted
to see how “nature” painted and if it ended up looking like a Pollock
(it did). He made his way to Oregon’s physics department to study the
most efficient ways to move electricity: in multiple tributaries like
those found in river systems, or lung bronchi, or cortical neurons.
When electrical currents move through things like televisions, the
march of electrons is orderly. But in newer tiny devices that might be
only a hundred times larger than an atom, the order of currents breaks
down. It is more like ordered chaos. The patterns of the currents, like
those branches in lungs and neurons, are actually fractal, which means
they repeat at different scales. Now he’s using “bioinspiration” to
design a better solar panel. If nature’s solar panels—trees and plants
—are branched, why not manufactured panels? He frequently paddles
around Eugene’s Waldo Lake when he’s chewing on a problem.
Several years ago Taylor wrote an essay describing a seminal
insight: “The more I looked at fractal patterns, the more I was
reminded of Pollock’s poured paintings. And when I looked at his
paintings, I noticed that the paint splatters seemed to spread across
his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices.” Using
instruments designed to measure electrical currents, he examined a