Awe & Wonder in Election Week
I've voted. You've voted. Might I now suggest shouting cosmic facts at your people?
I’ve been researching the chronology of the universe, partly for a creative project I’m working on, partly (and probably more-so) as an election-coping strategy. As a result, I now shout random, awe-inducing cosmic facts at my husband whenever I see him. (I’m a good roommate.) On the eve of the election, I’m sharing a few with you too. May you find them wonder-making. Feel free to shout them—or whisper or sing them—at your people, out the windows, to the cars in traffic, towards the sky, whenever you want to shift the scale of your perspective…. Whenever you want a little wonder or awe.
Inside your body are a few grams of a hydrogen that formed from the Big Bang. You are literally carrying microscopic bits 14 billion years old. So is everyone else on the planet.
It took the universe four hundred million years to birth the first nuclear furnace we call a star. The Earth came over eight billion years later.
The size of the universe at its creation is thought to be zero. Everything we are, everything that is and was and will be once fit into literal nothing. This nothing was infinitely hot.
The two major theories that help us explain everything we know about the universe are incompatible. Still, we find them helpful.
