https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/04/22/richard-feynman-yo-yo-ma/ * Home * About * Contact * donating = loving * newsletter * [ ] [Go] * View Full Site The Marginalian The Marginalian The Marginalian loving = donating Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant -- a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. MONTHLY DONATION $3 / month $5 / month $7 / month $10 / month $25 / month START NOW ONE-TIME DONATION You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: GIVE NOW BITCOIN DONATION Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel a recurring donation? Go here. Archives [ ] [Go] [browse by subject] surprise me ABOUT CONTACT SUPPORT SUBSCRIBE Newsletter RSS CONNECT Facebook Twitter Instagram Tumblr Sunday newsletter The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours: [ ] [ ] [ ] [Subscribe] midweek newsletter Also: Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below -- it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces: [ ] [ ] [ ] [Subscribe] Also The Universe in Verse The Universe in Verse Figuring Figuring The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story A Velocity of Being A Velocity of Being art sounds bites bookshelf Favorite Reads Of Trees, Solitude, Love, Loss, and the Stubborn Symphony of Aliveness: The Best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian 2021 Of Trees, Solitude, Love, Loss, and the Stubborn Symphony of Aliveness: The Best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian 2021 Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert Singularity: Marie Howe's Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film Singularity: Marie Howe's Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda's Love Letter to Earth's Forests The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda's Love Letter to Earth's Forests Rebecca Solnit's Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us Rebecca Solnit's Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times A Stoic's Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety A Stoic's Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel The Writing of "Silent Spring": Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power The Writing of "Silent Spring": Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change see more Related Reads Singularity: An Animated Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other (Toshi Reagon Sings Marissa Davis) Singularity: An Animated Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other (Toshi Reagon Sings Marissa Davis) The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings Octopus Empire: An Animated Poem Octopus Empire: An Animated Poem Labors of Love Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized [sleepproductivitywriters_50][sleepproductivitywriters_50] 7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated [holstee_7things][holstee_7things] Anais Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman [anais_debbie1][anais_debbie1] Anais Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman [anaisnin_debbiemillman2_500][anaisnin_debbiemillman2_500] Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts [sontaglove_unlimited][sontaglove_unlimited] Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts [sontagart][sontagart] Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton [wendycamus][wendycamus] The Holstee Manifesto [holsteemanifesto][holsteemanifesto] The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks [oliversacks_debbiemillman][oliversacks_debbiemillman] Atoms with Consciousness: Yo-Yo Ma Performs Richard Feynman's Ode to the Wonder of Life, Animated "Out of the cradle onto the dry land... here it is standing... atoms with consciousness... matter with curiosity... I... a universe of atoms... an atom in the universe." By Maria Popova This is the final installment in the nine-part animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER NINE [animations][animations]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 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. [feynman][feynman] Every once in a while -- perhaps once or twice a century, if we are lucky -- atoms shed by dying stars constellate into a living mind so shimmering, so uncommonly gifted in multiple fathoming-languages, that poems and paintings, elegies and equations, theorems and songs spring from it with equal ardor and equal beauty. Rebecca Elson was one. Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918-February 15, 1988) was another -- a Nobel-winning physicist, a philosopher, an artist, composer of the world's most lyrical footnote and most bittersweet love letter, who saw no boundary between knowledge and mystery, between our different modes of fathoming reality and serenading the wonder of the universe that made us. 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? (public library), published the year of his death. [feynman_speciallecture][feynman_speciallecture]Richard Feynman lecturing at CalTech In this ninth and final installment of the animated Universe in Verse , legendary cellist and Silkroad founder Yo-Yo Ma -- one of the most boundlessly curious and wonder-smitten minds I know, who knew Feynman and shares with him a passionate appreciation of science as the native poetry of reality -- brings this prose-poem to life in a soulful, symphonic reading, animated by artist and designer Kelli Anderson (who previously animated Jane Hirshfield's poem "Optimism" at the second annual Universe in Verse in 2018 and Amanda Palmer's reading of "Hubble Photographs: After Sappho" by Adrienne Rich at the third live show in 2019). Radiating from it all -- from Feynman's words, from Yo-Yo's music, from Kelli's animation -- is what Feynman himself once told Yo-Yo: "Nature has the greatest imagination of all." [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. Previously in the series: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers); Chapter 4 (dark matter and the mystery of our mortal stardust, with Patti Smith and Rebecca Elson); Chapter 5 (a singularity-ode to our primeval bond with nature and each other, starring Toshi Reagon and Marissa Davis); Chapter 6 (Emmy Noether, symmetry, and the conservation of energy, with Amanda Palmer and Edna St. Vincent Millay); Chapter 7 (the science of entropy and the art of alternative endings, with Janna Levin and W.H. Auden); Chapter 8 (nonhuman consciousness and the wonder of octopus intelligence, with Sy Montgomery and Marilyn Nelson). donating = loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant -- a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. Monthly donation $3 / month $5 / month $7 / month $10 / month $25 / month START NOW One-time donation You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: GIVE NOW BITCOIN DONATION Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 CANCEL MONTHLY SUPPORT Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay -- life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. Sunday newsletter The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours: [ ] [ ] [ ] [Subscribe] midweek newsletter Also: Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below -- it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces: [ ] [ ] [ ] [Subscribe] -- Published April 22, 2022 -- https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/04/22/richard-feynman-yo-yo-ma/ -- BP www.themarginalian.org BP PRINT ARTICLE EMAIL ARTICLE * Pocket * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Reddit * Filed Under animationculturefilmKelli AndersonmusicphilosophypoetryRichard FeynmanscienceThe Universe in VerseYo-Yo Ma View Full Site The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from any link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. 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