A Short History of Nearly Everything

Scientists dealt with this paradox in the handiest possible way. They ignored it.

Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.

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