The mystery of life for us to wonder at

Natural beauty that inspires us to use our ability to wonder

The ever-creative Maria Popova and American Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman are featured in this post on science, wonder and reality.

The United States-based Popova's work is dedicated to giving people experiences that rekindle their sense of enchantment, a quality much needed as imaginations wither in the desert of modern life. She is a bibliophile and celebrates the best of the literary and arts world, supporting creativity to guide those lost in the wilderness of superficiality that Western culture has become.

One of her latest projects has been a collaborative effort that combines poetry, science, and animated video. The title of this adventure is The Universe in Verse:

a season of perspective-broadening, mind-deepening, heart-leavening stories about science and our search for truth, enlivened by animated poems with original music: emblems of our longing for meaning.

Popova's perspective reaches out beyond the boundaries of the here-and-now, to the point of acknowledgement that what inspires our wonder manifests the profound love shown by God the Creator. 

Her introduction to Feynman's contribution to The Universe in Verse illuminates all of human life: 

Here we are, each of us a portable festival of wonder, standing on this rocky body born by brutality, formed from the debris that first swarmed the Sun 4.5 billion years ago and pulverized each other in a gauntlet of violent collisions, eventually forging the Moon and the Earth.

Here we are, now standing on it, on this improbable planet bred of violence, which grew up to be a world capable of trees and tenderness. A conscious world. A world shaped by physics and animated by art, by poetry, by music and mathematics — the different languages we have developed to listen to reality and speak it back to ourselves.

Here we are, voicing in these different languages our fundamental wonderment: What is all this? This byproduct of reality we call life: not probable, not even necessary, and yet it is all we know, because it is all we are, and it is with the whole of what we are that we reckon with reality, that we long to fathom it — from the scale of gluons to the scale of galaxies, from the mystery of the cell to the mystery of the soul.

In setting the scene for Feynman's piece, Popova writes: 

In the autumn of 1955, a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman took the podium at the National Academy of Sciences to contemplate the value of science. Midway through his characteristically eloquent and intellectually elegant lecture, addressing the country’s most orthodox audience of academic scientists, he burst into what can best be described as a splendid prose-poem about the mystery and wonder of life, inspired by a reflective moment he spent alone on the edge of the sea, where Rachel Carson, too, found the meaning of life. It later became the epilogue to Feynman’s final collection of autobiographical reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, published the year of his death [1988].

[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]

by Richard Feynman

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.

 Yes, our two creative commentators agree. Feynman denotes each of us as a superb "I", splendid because we are "atoms with consciousness... matter with curiosity", crowned with excessive capabilities  —  each of us "wonders at wondering". We are endowed, as Popova states, with "life: not probable, not even necessary", and beyond that outrageous element of reality, we have in our hearts the eyes to contemplate "the mystery and wonder of life".  

Ω See also this post on science and immortality.

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