Born in the Hearts of Stars

Despite what you may have read in your storybooks, in the moment before time began there was nothing but the void. There was no being to move across the surface of the water, and no water to be moved across. There was no god, no man, and no woman. No earth, or matter, or gravity. Darkness was the only vista, and silence the only music. Had language existed in that moment, had it merely existed to describe the lack, it would have consisted only of negation, indicating the absence of good and evil, the want of want or plenty. There were no planets, no stars, no shooting lights, no mountainous cavernous wastes of land, no gaseous opaque fogs. In fact, in the moment before time began, there were no such thing as anything. No tangible hopes or fears, or sensate life to hold such hopes and fears. There was no future and no past. No sexlovepeacewarhappinesspestilencejustice. There was only a perfect, utter stillness.

Then all hell broke loose.

Cosmologists tell us that in an instantaneous instant, almost 14 billion years ago, in a super massive explosion, the entire mass of the universe, having been compressed into an infinitely small super-heated ball, having been defined down to nil, inflated. That’s the term the scientists use, inflated. As if the making of everything we see, or imagine we see, or imagine but know that we will never see, could be described by using a term that signifies the raising of prices on milk. It’s really kind of sad, this notion that, even with the mountain of tears we‘ve shed since the spilling of milk across the galaxy, we still haven’t developed an ability to describe our feelings better or to put into words the reason for our troubles. It’s as if it left us speechless, breathless, our very thought -- the electrical patterns in our minds that shape concepts and give them voice -- defined down to nil. Nevertheless, despite our lack of language, or perhaps because of it, the resultant force of this explosion was almost unimaginable. Matter itself, and before that the building blocks of matter, and before that the forces which shape those building blocks -- electricity, magnetism, gravity -- were created in the blink of an eye. In fact, it took even less than a blink, it took the blink of a blink -- it took less than the time to imagine the blink of a blink or the time to imagine imagining. It was that damned fast. The universe was spilled across the whole of space like so many marbles tossed onto a table. It was unleashed like hormonal urges at a public high school dance. Chaos and collisions occurred, heat and light were formed. It was as if the whole of heaven had suddenly squeezed itself entire through the eye of a needle and came roaring out the other side with incomprehensible fury. It was if a woman had been spurned, and would now have her shrewish revenge.

As one might imagine, this process of inflation, this wild uncontained explosion, this colossal two-year-old’s outburst, had a number of odd results. Chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that, as the universe was exploding outward, particles were collapsing inward, driven by the introduction of forces that had been until then unknown. Quarks and leptons… electrons, neutrons, and protons… atoms and their resultant matter -- all were pushed and pulled by force and gravity at incredible unknown speeds. Energy and the attraction of harmonious vibrations unwound in a frantic dance. The fundamental particles that came to make up everything were all thrown outward like teenagers expelled from their homes. Understandably, they sought refuge in the attraction of like particles and substances. Suddenly finding themselves homeless, like disowned youth, like runaways, they needed a place to crash. So like sought like, and hydrogen formed, and helium, and spinning gaseous stars on the outer reaches of space. It’s kind of funny that helium and hydrogen were made first, and that they in turned formed stars. It was as if the universe, now barely seconds old, just minutes after birth, had decided to throw a party, and needed balloons and transport, maybe a disco ball or two. Accordingly, the material forces which shape matter, acting like a planning committee, began to decorate the broad flat gym of space. Banners were hung from the ceiling, and balloons were inflated and released, to hang in the still of space. The revelers settled in, and the stars heated up, and the expansion cooled down. A pleasant radiant buzz was felt as night came on.

Now as anyone who has been to such a party can tell you, it takes all kinds to make it work. If you invite too many from the same crowd you may get a lack of conflict, but you will also suffer from a lack of any fun. Someone needs to be the life of the party. And life, we are told by the scientists, requires carbon, as well as other elements to stand around and laugh at carbon’s jokes. So the universe added variety. Hydrogen and helium, as we have noted, had arrived first along with a few other stragglers, but they just stood in the corners along the walls and under the lights, and waited for the rest of matter’s constituents, half a billion years later, to show up fashionably late. This raises, of course, the question of where, in a universe of exploding, expanding simple gases, did all the variety come from? Where did the iron come from that gives tint to your blood and the calcium that gives strength to your bones? These are just a few examples, obviously, and they are drawn perhaps from the conceit that bones and blood are important. But ignoring this conceit, and overlooking the question of how the gases themselves seemed to come from out of nowhere, we may still reasonably ask: once the wheels were set in motion, once the party had begun, how did we get to the diversity of matter that we see all around us, that we stand or sit upon, that we feel in our hearts or that form our working minds? In a universe that started with a simple, brute exclamation point, in other words, how did we get to the periodic table? It is a question punctuated by an elementary curiosity about the curious elements which mark us. And for questions such as this, we have somewhere to turn for the answers, to satisfy our curiosity. In fact, we don’t even have to try that hard in order to seek the answers.

Imagine it is the morning after the party, or the morning after a thousand mornings, and we are standing in the same gymnasium, now lined up in neatly ordered rows of chairs, organized and rationalized, with only the unswept detritus from the party in the corners of the room, bits of streamers left floating along the edges of the room seeming to hint at the revelry from the night of nights before. A press conference has been called where we are seeking answers. Someone has posed the question. Where did all this stuff come from? We are sitting with bated breath. We are all pressed forward, waiting for the answer, and the line of cosmologists standing on the podium sways with anticipation at the first hint of the question. They hold their line for less than a second before the scientists push forward, rushing to the microphone, tripping over each other to be the first to get the answer out, to be heard by the assembled crowd.

We are born, the scientists tell us, in the hearts of stars.