[SOUND] [MUSIC] My name's Michael Russell. I work at the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena. I'm interested in the origin of life. Read the literature. I mean read proper books. On any new discovery, it's worth going back to the Crick and Watson paper and reading it and having a really good knowledge of it. And try to think of it their way. I remember Crick saying he was appalled that the poor students on the number 62 bus on Kingridge had to learn about the bases because they never had to learn about them. If you discover them than you don't have to learn about them. And it is the height of knowledge. The best way to try to get to that height of knowledge is to try to take the same pathway as the particular discovery entailed. And then the other things I would do is to take spontaneous music making seriously, because it's a very good example of a self-organizing system that automatically hits ones heart and mind when it's happening. So I'm, old-fashioned and my favorite, my favorite musician when I was young was somebody called Charlie Parker. And I'm told, and I never saw him unfortunately, although I did see Clint Eastwood's movie called Bird, which was a terrific, just the next best thing. And people would say that when Charlie Parker played and he was on for everybody shut up. They just knew it was happening. And, of course, he's got a whole band behind him and he's got a trumpeter there, perhaps Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis or somebody like that, and the drummer. And they knew when it was happening, when everybody was kind of cooperating, kind of feeling the vibe, I guess, is the language. And I think to understand that the world works through self organization and we can feed it ourselves. So this is another point about having visceral roots. And then one of my favorite views on all this is to recognize that, at least to my mind, that the art historians rather dismiss Van Gogh. They say that it didn't go anywhere. If you want somebody, it was Gauguin that went everywhere. If you follow Gauguin you can watch the rest of modern art. And all come from perhaps Gauguin. But nevertheless, Van Gogh made that wonderful discovery, to my mind, that the world itself is far from equilibrium, and he could tell everybody and everybody could listen. Just like everybody could listen to Charlie Parker in those days, and my favorite picture by van Gogh is called of course Starry Night, and it's in dentist waiting rooms, I think it's even been on chocolate boxes. Why is it, that everybody gets it, and yet it's a most extraordinary picture. Where, if you have a look at that picture, very unlike normal Van Gogh, the church looks like this, there's the steeple. And there's all the houses, they look like little crystals. But the rest, the cyprus tree is doing this, the rocks are doing this. And right in the middle of it is, m51, the galaxy m51. And he was the first person ever to paint a galaxy. And he took liberties with it because he put a comet on the back. So we've got a comet's tail. And the stars are different colors. And as I like to say well they are different colors. And there's a most wonderful, I think he's name's Berm and he was a professor at UCLA, University College Los Angeles, it's not, it's University of California Los Angeles. And he decided having looked at this picture to go to the Griffith Observatory and ask them to wheel back the observatory to look at the night on Van Gogh, and I think it's the July the 4th 1889, but I could get that wrong. And did that until four o'clock in the morning, and he occupied a cell in this asylum that he'd put to and they went to the same, well actually they went to the next door cell, they looked at at four o'clock in the morning and there was the picture. He'd turned the, I think he turned the rising sun into the moon or something like that, so he'd taken a few liberties. But there was the picture and there was the stars in the right place, and of course the galaxies, the other galaxy, M51 which was discovered as a nebula in I think 1841 by somebody called Ross in Ireland. But he put that actually right in there in the middle. And to me this was extraordinary. This follow just said right. This is what she've got. And I need my head to tell you. And unfortunately it's not much fun in here. But it's like being Beethoven. This is the way the world is. [MUSIC]
