welcome
Who are you? What is this magazine about? Why would I want to spend some of my valuable time and money reading it?
Dear Reader: We are people like you, passionate about life, the arts and ideas that make a difference; we like the playful and thoughtful interaction of words, music and images; we care about the preservation and transmission of culture and the environment; we are both worried and hopeful about the current state of the world; we think positively but not naively about technology and innovation and we want to reconnect science and the humanities for the service of mankind. Like you, we do not want to live in a world where people are told to get into a compartment and stay put. We want to move around squares and look behind boxes, and that is what we have been doing for most of our lives. We love mingling with challenging 2
|GLOBAL SQUARE
minds and kindred spirits, no matter if they lived hundreds of years ago, or today, or are still to be born. We are not afraid to travel in space and time in the pursuit of knowledge. In a way, this magazine is a time- machine and we want you to come with us for a ride, forward to the past and back to the proverbial future, but never losing sight of the present. Maybe our shared passions and goals amount to squaring the circle. Well, that is precisely what people we admire have been trying to do for ages, from the Greek philosophers to the Alchemists in the Middle Ages or even Michelangelo and his fellow geniuses in the Renaissance, all the way down to our times. Do not misunderstand us. For us, Squaring the Circle does not mean combining ciphers and letters in order to ďŹ nd any kind of arcane philosophical stone. It is not about resurrecting old rituals or founding new
