In two words, diagrams are superbly brilliant. Were we to travel back through time and visit the creative spaces of many if not all our great geniuses – certainly those of Galileo, Leonardo De Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, to name but a few – then we would find this really quite remarkable intelligence. Along with dizzying heights of obsession until that unforgettable ah-ha breakthrough, in at least the case of these leading thinkers and a great many more besides (most of whom I’m probably not aware of), we would find there a diagram.

They really are marvelous things. When it comes to creating, recording and communicating ideas, nothing quite competes. Strings of words are a wonderful tool. I have, after all, taken quite some time to write this book. Writing this has had me peer really deeply into some of its finer aspects but a map of visual forms brings a strength of its own: an obligation to force relationships, connections between things. They bring things together in concert into coherence. They strip the stray words, the repetition; out with the unnecessary. An aid of focus, like a guiding lens to the essentials, the foundations — the most abstract when done well, and so they can bring also an incredible simplicity to a subject. 

Or to put to answer the question another way: I love them because I deeply adore trying to understand how things work, or at least how things could. I love a good ponder. So how could I not attempt such a job for the biggest most cherished ideas of life?