ORIGINS:
FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION,
by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith,pp.143 (W.W. Norton &
Co., NY, London:2004)
“Rich
in possibility though the future may be, we should not neglect the
astrophysicists' impressive accomplishments during the past three
decades, which spring from their ability to create new instruments to
observe the universe. Carl Sagan liked to say that you had to be made
from wood not to stand in awe of what the cosmos has done. Thanks to
our improved observations, we now know more than Sagan ever did about
the amazing sequence of events that led to our existence: the quantum
fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy on a scale
smaller than the size of a proton that spawned superclusters of
galaxies, thirty million light-years across. From chaos to cosmos,
this cause-and-effect relationship crosses more than thirty-eight
powers of ten in size and more than forty-two powers of ten in time.
Like the microscopic strands of DNA that predetermine the identity of
a macroscopic species and the unique properties of its members, the
modern look and feel of the cosmos was writ in its earliest moments,
and carried relentlessly through time and space. We feel it when we
look up. We feel it when we look down. We feel it when we look
within.”
