This week’s Economist has a very interesting — dare I say “inspirational”? — obituary for Albert Hofmann, the German chemist who first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, a.k.a. LSD or more simply, acid. This sounds much more interesting than the sort of afternoons I have after coming back from the lab:

Perhaps, he supposed, he had inhaled the fumes of the solvent he was using. In any event, he took himself home and lay down on the sofa. There the world exploded, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, spirals and light.
["Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th, aged 102" via The Economist]

Lest you be tempted into immediately downing a few tabs in an attempt to explode your own world, the article ends with a reminder of the simpler — i.e. cheaper — thrills in life:

As a child, wandering in May on a forest path above Baden in a year he had forgotten, he had suddenly been filled with such a sense of the radiance and oneness of creation that he thought the vision would last for ever. “Miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” had ambushed him elsewhere, too: the wind in a field of yellow chrysanthemums, leaves in the sunlit garden after a shower of rain. When he had drunk LSD in solution on that fateful April afternoon he had recovered those insights, but had not surpassed them. His advice to would-be trippers, therefore, was simple. “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”