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Mercury, March/April 2001 Table of Contents

Astronomers and writers alike come to grips with the fact that life evolved out of the strangeness of the early universe.

by Chris Impey, University of Arizona

This is the second part of an article that deals with the way that writers and poets have reacted to the insights of modern cosmology. Over the 14 billion years since the Big Bang, gravity has sculpted a bewildering arrays of structures, from superclusters of galaxies down to planetary systems. Cosmological theory traces the expansion back to the first iota of time, when our universe emerged from a seething space-time foam. Astronomers and writers alike have struggled to understand the properties of nature that could have led to something as unlikely as us.