This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge as unknown as the bottom of
the bottomless sea of the other idea—just as mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as
the poetic pictures that came before.
But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. Or the earth and time. Have you read anywhere, by any poet, anything about time that compares with
real time, with the long, slow process of evolution? Nay, I went too quickly. First, there was the earth
without anything alive on it. For billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its waves and
the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate it. Can you conceive, can you
appreciate or fit into your ideas what can be the meaning of a world without a living thing on it? We are
so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it
means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in
the universe today there probably is nothing alive.
Or life itself. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns
out that all life is interconnected with all other life. The universality of the deep chemistry of living things is
indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time we human beings have been too proud even to
recognize our kinship with the animals.
Or there are the atoms. Beautiful - mile upon mile of one ball after another ball in some repeating pattern
in a crystal. Things that look quiet and still, like a glass of water with a covered top that has been sitting
for several days, are active all the time; the atoms are leaving the surface, bouncing around inside, and
coming back. What looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance.
And, again, it has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are of the
same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life
come from, or where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from?
It looks as if it was belched from some exploding star, much as some of the stars are exploding now. So
this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature
stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!
Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All
9 months ago • 0 notes