In the new YouTube era of mega mash-ups, a thing such as this – a 9:54-long series of clips depicting everything from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago to the extinction level asteroid impact that closed the Cretaceous and killed the dinosaurs – is an eventuality, a new meme reference for when the complicated bigness of it all fails to chill a mind that was never programmed to comprehend secrets so monumental, like a cheat sheet for surmising the grandest of hows…

Watching it reminds me of John Meynard Keynes study of Isaac Newton, in which he marveled at the man’s almost animist world view.

Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty – just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.

I’m not much a God guy, but I dig the enthusiasm. It’s the ultimate search, and now its solved – reduced to a music video.

PS. That it’s set to the instrumental tune that is also in the explosive, slow-mo trailer to Spike Jonze’s “Fully Flared” skateboarding video is a bonus.