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By Root 681 0

emerged, the rise and fall of the Sun and the stars in the night sky went unnoticed. These creatures are our ancestors, and in fact there is also evidence at Burgess that we humans may only exist because of one particular adaptation in a strange, worm-like creature called a Pikaia. Although the Pikaia looks unimpressive, it may be one of the most important animals ever discovered. It is thought by some, although not all, evolutionary biologists that the Pikaia is the earliest known ancestor of modern vertebrates – the branch of life that we are categorised in – so it could be that this little worm-like creature is our earliest known ancestor. What is also fascinating about Pikaia is that it may have had light-sensitive cells that allowed it to evade predators and survive in the Cambrian seas – cells that may have evolved over many hundreds of millions of years into our eyes. This is all speculative, but it is possible that without Pikaia’s primitive yet remarkable ability to detect the light from the Sun, we humans may never have appeared on planet Earth. Perhaps there would never have been a life form here with the ability to do the one thing that has allowed us to understand our universe more than anything else: to look up.

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We have even been able to capture the light from the beginning of time and we have glimpsed within it the seeds of our own origins.

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Understanding the Universe is like reading a detective story, and the essential evidence we need to solve it has been carried to us across the vast expanses of space and time by light. We have even been able to capture the light from the beginning of time and we have glimpsed within it the seeds of our own origins. We’ve seen things our ancestors wouldn’t believe: stars being born in distant realms, and galaxies lost in time at the very edge of the visible Universe and our cosmos just moments after it all began.

It’s a wonderful thought that these primitive biological light detectors that emerged on Earth half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Explosion have evolved into those most human of things; our green, blue and brown eyes that are able to gaze up into the night sky, capture the light from distant stars and tell the story of the Universe

NASA

CHAPTER 2

STARDUST

THE ORIGINS OF BEING

What are we made of? This is an old question, maybe one of the oldest, and one that thinkers and scientists have been working hard to answer since ancient times. This work continues today, and it may be that by the time you read this book the story of the search for the building blocks of the Universe will have another chapter. Such is the power, excitement and rate of progress of modern science. This chapter is the story of how those building blocks were created in the very early Universe, fused into more complex structures over billions of years in the furnaces of space, and delicately assembled by the forces of nature into planets, mountains, rivers and human beings.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the highest energy particle accelerator at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland). In this huge machine, 27km (17 miles) in circumference, proton beams are accelerated so that they collide head-on. The resultant particles can be detected and recorded so that scientists can then try to understand how they fit together.

DAVID PARKER / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The ancient Greeks thought deeply about the question of what we are made of, although they lacked the scientific methodology and technology to arrive at a definitive answer. This led to many competing hypotheses, including some that got close to our modern view: we are all made out of smaller pieces. That there are the smallest building blocks of matter (indivisible basic units that can be fitted together to build the world) was termed the ‘atomic hypothesis’, a theory usually credited to two thinkers – Leucippus and Democritus – in around 400 BC. They held that the world was created from an infinite number of different types of indivisible and indestructible