We are, each of us, a little Universe.
However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.
If you ask people where they’re from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth’s surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, “I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.
The best colleges admit only successful students, offering no evidence the college itself forged the students’ late success.
You realize when you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.
The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.
If all the molecules on Earth were stacked on each other end-to-end, everything on Earth would die.
That is, cosmic dark matter enjoys about six times the mass of all the visible matter.
With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.
The urge to want some bit of information to be true often clouds our ability to assess why that information may be false.
From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.
I don’t know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.
As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it’s not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people – theologians as well scientists – have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.
Science depends on organized skepticism, that is, on continual, methodical doubting. Few of us doubt our own conclusions, so science embraces its skeptical approach by rewarding those who doubt someone else’s.
The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between – as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings or nonempirical philosophies – you need politics.
Turns out, while all light pollution is bad for astrophysics, the low-pressure sodium lamps are least bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, the entire city of Tucson, Arizona, the nearest large municipality to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, has, by agreement with the local astrophysicists, converted all its streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps.
Bosons, by the way, are named for the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose.
Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun.
The one we call Earth formed in a kind of Goldilocks zone around the Sun, where oceans remain largely in liquid form.