More science

Tonight, I enjoyed a glass of cool water with my dinner. Every kid knows the formula for the liquid of life: H2O. Hydrogen plus oxygen. Hydrogen is ancient, ancient stuff.

About 300,000 years after the Big Bang, protons cobbled together from quarks began to snag electrons and hydrogen was born, joining helium in the universe.

Our sun is mainly composed of these two elements.

With the proper equipment, a scientist could take my glass of drinking water and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen gas would float freely again as it had in those earliest days of the universe, long before it married oxygen to form "water."

Because we living things are mostly water -- from a gooey jellyfish to a beautiful Woman, we transport this ancient element, this stuff of the stars, around with us everywhere we go.

How we got here

"Science" literally means "knowledge."

And our current knowledge tells us that our entire universe was once a super-dense point that exploded into the Big Bang. I marveled over that in a previous post, a long time ago.

Following this incredible event, sparked by who knows what -- God if you are a believer -- there was still nothing recognizable in the universe, not even the basic atoms that underlie all that we now see and experience. There were only tiny particles (is that the correct term?) which we call quarks. And then they began to bind to form neutrons and protons ... which would eventually lead to the formation of atoms.

So is anything smaller than a quark? This sort of thing is fascinating to me.