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In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, from the watery expanse, there was a huge snowstorm, which attracted almost all existing life.
then over the aqueduct he throws a wave of as many as 300 Pess. But it is nothing compared to the celestial movements and fireworks 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.
Science and history documentary Dan Levitt, writing the book “What’s Inside You: The History of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang to Last Supper,” evokes a series of striking and often intense images in tracing how our cells, elements, atoms, and subatomic particles penetrated our brains and all our bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24th.
“We now know that the origin of the universe, the formation of the elements in the stars, the creation of the solar system and the world, and the first history of our planet was an incredible upheaval,” Levitt told CNN.
Almost incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures, although they were necessary for life.
The upheaval of Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a hail of asteroids into Earth, seeding the planet with water in the process. And the molten iron that formed the Earth’s core created a magnetic field that shields us from cosmic rays.
“There were so many things we could have done another way,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”
Retracing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms across billions of years, he said, filled him with reverence and grace.
“Sometimes when I look at people, I think, ‘Wow, you’re such an incredible organism and our atoms all have the same deep history, which goes back to the big bang,'” he said. He hopes that readers will recognize that “even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect.” And all men are also.’
Our bodies contain 60 or so elements, including the torrent of hydrogen that rode in after the big bang and the calcium of dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt gathered evidence of how the more complex organic molecules themselves came to us, he weaved together a tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.
He didn’t initially set out to be like the tumultuous things that are happening in the scientific world, but it sure comes with the territory. “So much science was overthrown when our ancestors were alive,” he said. “This is the fun part of the book.”
After Levitt finished his first draft, he realized that his surprise was part of the scientific upheaval due to a variety of popular studies. “I wanted to get inside the heads of scientists who made great discoveries — to see their progress as they did it and understand how they were received over time,” he said. “I’m surprised that almost every time, the initial reaction to foundational theories is skepticism and dismissal.”
Throughout the book, he shows six recurring mental traps that have either blinded bright minds, such as the belief that “it’s too weird to be true” or “if we don’t detect our tools, it isn’t.”
Albert Einstein initially hated the new idea of an expanding universe, for example, and for a time he was convinced by Georges Lemaître, a little-known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry,” who ingeniously simulated early-Earth conditions in glass vials, is a notoriously fierce opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral enzymes and super-heated vents. . And so on.
“The history of science has been written with older, grand proclamations of certainties that would soon be overturned,” Levitt writes in the book. Thankfully for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and free thinkers who delighted in tossing around these thought-provoking ideas.
Levitt described how many subsequent exiles were carried out by researchers who never received due credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to the praises of heroic actors who haven’t heard of it before,” he said. “Yes, I was delighted that many of the most gripping stories in the book were about people I didn’t know.
There are such physicists as the Austrian researcher Marietta Blau, who helped physicists with some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that leaves of the sun can create oxygen through photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.
The wonders of the universe
Lightning sparks of new ideas often strike independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that several scientists had developed plausible scenarios for how life could be assembled in building blocks.
“Our universe abounds in organic molecules – many of them are precursors to the molecules we’re made of,” he says. “Alternately, therefore, between thinking that it is so improbable that creatures like us exist, and that life must exist in many places in the universe.”
Nothing about our journey was directed by the great and mighty, however.
“If you were trying to figure out how life evolved from organic molecules, it would have been a herky-jerky process, full of convoluted paths and failures,” Levitt said. Most of these have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of making winners out of countless experiments over long periods of time.
Nature also has a way of recycling blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold discovered that “half of our carbon atoms are replaced every two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms each year,” Levitt writes.
Like a house constantly under renovation, old parts are always changing and we replace them with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which seem to replace every decade.
Eventually our cells will rest, but parts of them will be assembled into other life forms. “We may die, but our atoms do not,” Levitt writes. “Throughout life, the soil, the seas, and the sky are involved in happy chemicals.”
Like the death of the stars, that is, our destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.
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