have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .
and fit in a teaspoon.
And then there’s all that we don’t know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.
Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.
Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.
Earth’s surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.
Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie’s song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.
Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.
No planets, which are things,
no time.
We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other’s birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.
If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.
If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were when the light left them. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars were years and years and years in the past.
If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was eight minutes ago.
If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything all at once. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.
Time is not consistent:
it bends and warps and curves;
it speeds up and slows down;
it shifts and changes.
Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.
It’s an expanding,
shifting,
spinning,
turning,
rotating,
slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.
There is no universal up;
there is no ultimate down;
there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.
Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.
There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.
Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.
The sun is both a star that we orbit,
and our primary source of energy.
It is a physical object,
and it is the engine of life for our planet.
The sun is made of matter,
and the sun is energy.
At the same time.
Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.
Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc2 formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.
Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?
What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.
II. Who Ordered That?
For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .
You could, ideally, make sense of things.
Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.
Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.
Atoms, it turns out, are small.
About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.
A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).
An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.
That small.
But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.
If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the