Cosmos - Carl Sagan [116]
CHAPTER IX
THE LIVES OF THE STARS
We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.
—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
I have … a terrible need … shall I say the word?… of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.
—Vincent van Gogh
To make an apple pie, you need wheat, apples, a pinch of this and that, and the heat of the oven. The ingredients are made of molecules—sugar, say, or water. The molecules, in turn, are made of atoms—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and a few others. Where do these atoms come from? Except for hydrogen, they are all made in stars. A star is a kind of cosmic kitchen inside which atoms of hydrogen are cooked into heavier atoms. Stars condense from interstellar gas and dust, which are composed mostly of hydrogen. But the hydrogen was made in the Big Bang, the explosion that began the Cosmos. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Suppose you take an apple pie and cut it in half; take one of the two pieces, cut it in half; and, in the spirit of Democritus, continue. How many cuts before you are down to a single atom? The answer is about ninety successive cuts. Of course, no knife could be sharp enough, the pie is too crumbly, and the atom would in any case be too small to see unaided. But there is a way to do it.
At Cambridge University in England, in the forty-five years centered on 1910, the nature of the atom was first understood—partly by shooting pieces of atoms at atoms and watching how they bounce off. A typical atom has a kind of cloud of electrons on the outside. Electrons are electrically charged, as their name suggests. The charge is arbitrarily called negative. Electrons determine the chemical properties of the atom—the glitter of gold, the cold feel of iron, the crystal structure of the carbon diamond. Deep inside the atom, hidden far beneath the electron cloud, is the nucleus, generally composed of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons. Atoms are very small—one hundred million of them end to end would be as large as the tip of your little finger. But the nucleus is a hundred thousand times smaller still, which is part of the reason it took so long to be discovered.* Nevertheless, most of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.
I am made of atoms. My elbow, which is resting on the table before me, is made of atoms. The table is made of atoms. But if atoms are so small and empty and the nuclei smaller still, why does the table hold me up? Why, as Arthur Eddington liked to ask, do the nuclei that comprise my elbow not slide effortlessly through the nuclei that comprise the table? Why don’t I wind up on the floor? Or fall straight through the Earth?
The answer is the electron cloud. The outside of an atom in my elbow has a negative electrical charge. So does every atom in the table. But negative charges repel each other. My elbow does not slither through the table because atoms have electrons around their nuclei and because electrical forces are strong. Everyday life depends on the structure of the atom, Turn off the electrical charges and everything crumbles to an invisible fine dust. Without electrical forces, there would no longer be things in the universe—merely diffuse clouds of electrons, protons and neutrons, and gravitating spheres of elementary particles, the featureless remnants of worlds.
When we consider cutting an apple pie, continuing down beyond a single atom, we confront an infinity of the very small. And when we look up at the night sky, we confront an infinity of the very large. These infinities represent an unending regress that goes on not just very far, but forever. If you stand between