Symphony of Science
I must admit to having some difficulty in choosing the category for this post, for this is a unique mashup of science, technology, music and, in a sense, poetry.
The Symphony of Science project is a creative effort to promote the interest in or, perhaps more precisely, the fascination with science.
The project has taken old scientific educational TV programs and put them through Auto-Tune, a software application for adjusting voice recording. Mashing them up with music, the musings of Carl Sagan, Richard P. Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye form a tapestry of quotations which are presented lovingly, in a tribute to scientific research, experimentation and debate.
What makes this work so well is partly that the enthusiasm of the featured scientists and people behind the project is very real, partly that this kind of science is poetic in its very nature.
Carl Sagan in particular has a talent for putting it in poetic terms:
The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature
I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
Is this not beautiful? These people seem almost bold in their willingness to tackle the thought of infinity of space and time, stubbornly insistant in asking how long this reality has existed and tackling, well, creation.
A fascinating passage by Neil deGrasse Tyson:
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
- and his devotion to the question and his insistance that this must be of real interest to every human out there:
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??
Scientists of this kind are always getting harsh words for the way they try to zoom the microscope, provide the full explanation, which to some means taking the poetry out of the elements in nature - the sunrise, the stars, light and darkness, the world, the life that surrounds us. But the scientists insist on the beauty and the fascinating nature of it all.
Again, Sagan on the artful construction of natural reality:
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself
My last quote shall be by Richard Dawkins, who puts it like this:
There’s real poetry in the real world
Science is the poetry of reality
In my life, I am immersed in technology and development. We are all working on progress within the things we devote our lives to.
But I must admit that these musical scientific mashups - along with the fact that I am currently reading Surely you’re joking, mr. Feynman!, the autobiography of Richard P. Feynman - have infused me with an enthusiasm towards the inquisitive, the appreciation of looking at the world around us and taking it in.
I leave you for now with the video I have begun listening to at the beginning of every day. Fascinating.