A Short History of Nearly Everything

the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase,

where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

not a gratifying experience at the atomic level.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe

that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don’t intend to publish. I

am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”

“Don’t you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked.

“Yes,” said Szilard.

“He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”

-Hans Christian von Baeyer,

Taming the Atom