atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity

 

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Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? 

This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. 

This is not yet a scientific age.


—Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law (1962)

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I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. 

There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… 

I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

—Richard Feynman

a poem of sorts, an untitled ode to the wonder of life from a 1955 speech, spoken by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman 

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the marginalian

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