When nature first the world's foundation laid, she called a council how it might be made.

Motion was first, who had a subtle wit, and then came life and form and matter fit.

That is the opening stanza in a poem by Margaret Cavendish, a mid-1600s philosopher, pioneer of

social sciences, poet, as you realized, all around genius, the first woman to be

invited to the Royal Society. And she understood something about the nature of motion. Motion defines

our lives. Everything we see, everything we experience is all in motion, even if we become perfectly

still, slowing our breath,

controlling our heartbeat, and entering a state of perfect meditative awareness, there is still

motion.

Take a moment with me, just a brief one, to pause, to imagine yourself motionless so you can become aware of the incessant

restlessness of the universe around you, the beating of our hearts, the buzzing electrical

and chemical signals in our neurons, the flow of blood through capillaries, veins,

and arteries, the grinding of our food in our digestive tract, the storage, transformation,

and release of energy within our cells, the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our lungs.

The microscopic creatures crawling along our skin. Try not to think about that one too

much. The bombardment of cosmic rays. The exchanging of gluons within every atomic nucleus. The

balance of radiation absorbed and emitted by our bodies. Motion doesn't just define our lives.

It defines our universe. What is existence, except for a

constant interplay of energies as mediated by motion? This isn't just true at microscopic scales either.

In life, you're constantly moving. You walk or drive or bike or take a train to work. You pace around the

house. You head back to the kitchen for a snack. You hop on a flight to visit an old friend. You

wake up in the middle of the night to pee. On average, the typical human will move somewhere

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