Feynman Challenge

James Thornton is a poet, Zen Buddhist priest, and founder and president of ClientEarth, the leading global not-for-profit law group. As a lawyer, with the Earth as his client, James sees that 'Nature speaks in the grammar of science’. He is a Conservation Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. The New Statesman named him one of 10 people who could change the world. Irish-American, born in New York, James is also the author of Client Earth (Scribe 2018), co-authored with his husband Martin Goodman, which received the Judges’ Selection, Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature from Santa Monica Public Library. He has twice won Leader of the Year at the Business Green Awards. For his legal work, The Financial Times awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award. His writing includes two novels, a book of spiritual practice, and three volumes of poetry. He was a judge for the 2020 Laurel Awards for Ecopoetry. He lives in London and Los Angeles.

"In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue." - Edward O. Wilson"A brilliant introduction to the endless wonders of our universe, from quantum levels to the cosmos. It opened my eyes to many marvels and oddities." – Eberhard Fetz, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics, University of Washington"Poets sometimes flinch at the idea of footnotes. Poems, they think, should be perfect small worlds of their own. The Feynman Challenge upends this aesthetic. Like the Pompidou Centre, it wears all its workings on the outside. Plunging into the sea of scientific knowledge, it comes up grinning and glittering with droplets of lovely information. This is a generous book, happy to serve the curiosity, the wonder and humility of science, happening here and there in words that simply send a shudder -Two black holes are about to marry, a billion years ago - through our sense of time and space." – Philip Gross, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

• ContentsIntroductionCensus of deep lifeEmbodied semanticsOf mice and scorpionsRumination and forest bathing A dozen ways to make a living The future of clouds The jaguar sometimes bites Symbiont real estatePáramosThe apex predator guildYour inner fishTomb blossomsLong ago and under water Traumatic matingsQuartet with parasitesThe dead fish of ChadThe lodgerLike milkshakesHungry daughtersThe rolling of the dungballHead of glassFringed with teethE.O. Wilson’s favourite antEminent BritonsAerial warsPenis EnvyThe news about NeanderthalsConquering EarthA century of gorgingA bulletin from our branchWarm wet and quantumNew equilibriaThe rules of lossSpat 1ChiropteransCount those lostCoelacanths among usQ is for cryptographyRingdownThe end of time Too few to fill the skyNever forget red dwarfs The biggest star Cosmonautika A time will come By grace of the solar wind A map of peculiar velocities