Normally I’m not a science person; it was totally my dreaded subject in high school (even more-so than math, if that’s possible). But on Sunday I was checking out the local Unitarian Universalist Church (they got a cool philosophy) and found out that they do a lecture every week with a different speaker on totally random topics. This Sunday an astronomy professor gave a talk on stars. I went in with Walt Whitman running through my head (“When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me… How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick…”). I love the stars, but talks on them seem to devolve into math with alarming regularity, and then I just get lost.

He was fascinating. I learned that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that our sun (at 5 billion) is about half-way through it’s lifespan, that stars (which usually fuse hydrogen into helium to produce their heat), after their first death can have new life by fusing helium into other elements, and those elements into other elements… until stars make iron. Then they die for real. I learned that dark matter – which potentially 75% of the universe is composed of, and we don’t even know what it is – is pushing the universe further and further apart, so we likely won’t collapse back into another big bang like I’d been taught once upon a time. This sort of changes some of my meaning-of-life philosophy, but that’s OK; I’m flexible on our reason for existence.

But most importantly of all, I learned that the universe didn’t have any carbon when it started. Carbon was created by stars and their fusion power, and spewed out into the universe when some of them went supernova (at least I think it was during supernovas; I know that stars made and spewed carbon). Life, at least as we know it, is made from carbon. You are made from carbon. So am I. So is your cat. And your houseplant. So if you think about it, we don’t need to wait to become stars, as promised in “I Sing the Body Electric”. We already are.

Baby Avery was frowning at me when I came over, and I told her that she was made of stars – science had proved it. She smiled an enormous smile and laughed. I think she already knew that, but it was a good reminder.

So, I leave you with a quote from Eben Harrell’s article for Time magazine titled: “Did a Time Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?” :

Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, “Of course not, but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”