Sunday Motion Graphic Premiere: Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan

What a pleasant Sunday morning! The weather is bit chilly; but when you are wearing two socks, two pants and an uncountable number of woolen shirts, let there be an avalanche! Blow evn’ ya, thou winter wind!

And now two scientists are going to further stir up the moment. Richard Feynman (1918–1988), from the US west was Sheldon Cooper’s oja and Carl Sagan (1934 –1996), the all-rounder from US east, were both legends who equally contributed an ocean of knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

Both of them as well shared a a peculiar thing. They had produced gravitation-defying, minimal paragraphs that changed our thinking for good. Their views have been creatively visualised in these Vimeo videos embedded below.


Texts from theairspace.net and Wikipedia
Videos from Vimeo
Images from Wikimedia Commons

Richard Feynman: Ode to a flower   

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Richard Feynman - Ode To A Flower from Sweet Crude on Vimeo.

From the BBC Interview for Horizon 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
(bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/archive/feynman/)
Animated by Fraser Davidson (sweetcrude.tv).

Carl Sagan: Pale blue dot    

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Pale Blue Dot from Chin Li Zhi on Vimeo.

Set to the words of Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot is an animation that situates human history against the tapestry of the cosmos. Using a eclectic combination of art styles woven seamlessly together through music and visuals, the animation seeks to remind us that regardless of our differences, we are one species living together on the planet we call Earth.

An infographics companion providing contextual information to certain scenes of the animation can be viewed at https://www.behance.net/gallery/24360403/The-Human-Condition-Data-behind-the-Pale-Blue-Dot.

Animation and screenplay by: Chin Li Zhi
Music and sound design by: Leo Frick
Supervised by: Ishu Patel & Florian Käppler

Produced at NTU ADM in collaboration with Studiengang Musikdesign