2. Universe’s ingredients
Arguments about the very nature and fabric of the universe stretch back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. But the atomist theories of Ancient Greece are a far cry from what we now know. ‘The bedrock of 20th-century science was to understand that we and everything else are made up of atoms,’ says Martin Rees.

There are 92 types of naturally occurring atoms, allowing for billions of different combinations, forming the chemical components that underlie everything from the simplest crystals to the most complex objects that we know of – human beings.

Humans contain 10,000 trillion trillion atoms, linked together in a very complicated way. Building something as complex as a human being involves more than just massing together atoms. Says Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: ‘The big difference between a dead thing like a crystal and a living thing is not what they are made of. They’re both made of the same building blocks. It’s rather the complexity of how they’re put together.’ You have to keep arranging these atoms in new and different ways without repeating yourself. ‘That’s how you get this fantastic complexity which to me really is the hallmark of life,’ says Tegmark.

It has taken nature about 4 billion years to get from the simplest life forms on primordial Earth to the complex life forms of today. We just don't know how that happened, but we do know that the staggering variety of different substances would never have been possible if the universe hadn’t created the 92 different types of atoms that underlie everything that we know about.


< PREVIOUS PAGE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | NEXT PAGE >