A Short History of Nearly Everything: Introduction–Part I

To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while.

Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of the universe is thanks to an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, then at Stanford, now at MIT, named Alan Guth.

Had it been weaker, however, nothing would have coalesced. The universe would have remained forever a dull, scattered void.

Lower that value very slightly-from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say--and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly--to 0.008 percent--and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Almost all the telescopes we have in the world are designed to peer at very tiny little pieces of the sky way off in the distance to see a quasar or hunt for black holes or look at a distant galaxy.

One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell.

Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament.

A lot of astronomers believe it isn’t a planet at all, but merely the largest object so far found in a zone of galactic debris known as the Kuiper belt.

The more reclusive long-period comets (among them the recent visitors Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake) come from the much more distant Oort cloud

This alone makes it extremely anomalous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball.

If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light-years of us, we would be goners.

If you have ever looked through popular astronomical publications, and at some time you must have, you will know that they are generally full of richly luminous color photos of distant nebulae and the like — fairy-lit clouds of celestial light of the most delicate and moving splendor.

You will recall the cosmological conundrum with which we ended the first chapter--that the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements.

All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening.