Neutron Star Quotes

Now I've got nothing left to lose You take your time to choose I can tell you now without a trace of fear That my love will be forever And we'll die we'll die together Lie, I will never 'Cause our love will be forever" ~Neutron Star Collision (Love is Forever)

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.

So I've tried to make this book as dense as possible, like a neutron star. And if you think I came up with that simile by googling 'What stuff is most dense?', you'd be wrong. I already knew neutron stars were maybe dense before I googled it to make sure.

CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction- level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Cro- Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.

These stars marked the moments of the universe. There were aging orange embers, blue dwarfs, twin yellow giants. There were collapsing neutron stars, and angry supernovae that hissed into the icy emptiness. There were borning stars, breathing stars, pulsing stars, and dying stars. There was the Death Star.

The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes... lifeless echoes of their former majesty.

More energy is needed to rise a millimetre above a neutron star's surface than to break completely free of Earth's gravity. A pen dropped from a height of one metre would impact with the energy of a ton of TNT (although the intense gravity on a neutron star's surface would actually, of course, squash any such objects instantly). A projectile would need to attain half the speed of light to escape its gravity; conversely, anything that fell freely onto a neutron star from a great height would impact at more than half the speed of light.

that one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs billions of tonnes,

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

What’s wrong?” Kate asked. “Nothing… that’s just my soul collapsing like a neutron star,” Mary said. Kate thought the comparison was a little dramatic. “Why

Physicists today agree that Oppenheimer’s most stunning and original work was done in the late 1930s on neutron stars—a phenomenon astronomers would not actually be able to observe until 1967.

We use the effect of centrifugal forces on matter to offer insight into the rotation rate of extreme cosmic objects. Consider pulsars. With some rotating at upward of a thousand revolutions per second, we know that they cannot be made of household ingredients, or they would spin themselves apart. In fact, if a pulsar rotated any faster, say 4,500 revolutions per second, its equator would be moving at the speed of light, which tells you that this material is unlike any other. To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a hundred million elephants into a Chapstick casing. To reach this density, you must compress all the empty space that atoms enjoy around their nucleus and among their orbiting electrons. Doing so will crush nearly all (negatively charged) electrons into (positively charged) protons, creating a ball of (neutrally charged) neutrons with a crazy-high surface gravity. Under such conditions, a neutron star’s mountain range needn’t be any taller than the thickness of a sheet of paper for you to exert more energy climbing it than a rock climber on Earth would exert ascending a three-thousand-mile-high cliff. In short, where gravity is high, the high places tend to fall, filling in the low places—a phenomenon that sounds almost biblical, in preparing the way for the Lord: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain” (Isaiah 40:4). That’s a recipe for a sphere if there ever was one. For all these reasons, we expect pulsars to be the most perfectly shaped spheres in the universe.

Anna took love very seriously. She loved love. No, worshipped, that's the word. She worshipped love. That was the only thing which had any place in her life. That and hatred. Do you know what neutron stars are?' 'They're planets with such compactness and high surface gravity that if I dropped this cigarette on one of them it would strike with the same force as an atom bomb. It was the same with Anna. Her gravitation to love-and hatred-was so strong that nothing could exist in the space between them. Every tiny detail caused an atomic explosion. Do you understand? It took me time to understand. She was like Jupiter-hidden behind an eternal cloud of sulphur. And humour. And sexuality.

Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.

I come from the depths of infinity and from all directions of space-time. I traveled through dark tunnels, went through solar storms. I went straight, circled, parallel, rotated as a spiral. Cosmic clouds trapped me and escaped from them. Avoided collisions with meteories. I was helped by exotic particles, neutron stars and the love of gravity. Every leaf, every flower, every mountain and lake, every cloud and every star and every atom recognize me and greet me. I feel that i have live for million lifetimes. Who am i? What is my purpose? Last night i sent a question into universe, asking ”who am i or am i not? The universe responded immediately: ”You asked me the same thing billions of years ago. And then and now i answer: You’re the smile of no birth and no death, The Hidden Law!

Far from being empty, space is more like a snooker table. Stars explode or collide and that’s the white ball being smacked with the cue stick. Individual atoms go flying off at close to the speed of light. Regardless of how small they are, anything traveling that fast is dangerous. Even though space is a vacuum, given enough time, atoms will eventually collide with each other and—bang—the cosmic game of snooker just got interesting. Protons, neutrons and electrons scatter again, speeding along until they hit something else. If that something else happens to be alive, that’s bad—destroying cell walls and damaging DNA.

When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky’s work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky’s deductions concerning dark matter wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period.

A year after that, the great red star, its waist now nearly to Jupiter, all at once collapsed in on itself and exploded into a supernova that vaporized every remaining planet, asteroid, and comet of the eighteenth planetary system of the third spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. A beautiful magenta-and-yellow wash spread through space, like spilled watercolors. Sensors aboard the hundreds of starliners recorded the event, but even just a short time later, when the Second Fleet would awaken near Delphi, those brilliant clouds would already be gone, and only a small, cold neutron star would remain, a celestial gravestone to humanity’s birthplace. But here, in this final moment . . . As arcs of plasma glowed . . . As stardust glittered . . . As rare elements formed in the atomic foam . . . A fleet of silent black ships, flickering like droplets, moved swiftly into the storm they had secretly created, and got to work.

Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn’t nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn’t escape its immense gravitational pull. You would have a black hole. Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice

In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can’t understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It’s some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables—deoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further. Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn’t come out. You fall in, and you don’t come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest.

Landau pointed out that there was another possible final state for a star, also with a limiting mass of about one or two times the mass of the sun but much smaller even than a white dwarf. These stars would be supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between neutrons and protons, rather than between electrons. They were therefore called neutron stars. They would have a radius of only ten miles or so and a density of hundreds of millions of tons per cubic inch. At the time they were first predicted, there was no way that neutron stars could be observed. They were not actually detected until much later.

Now let us say our morning pledge together,” said the mysterious professor from his position on the branch. All the glowing star-children seemed to place their little hands over their unidentified middles. Even Tuntuni placed a yellow wing over his chest. “We pledge allegiance to the element hydrogen, and also its partner, helium,” chanted the little star-lings. Neel and I giggled from the back row like we were the classroom delinquents. Luckily, no one seemed to hear us, and the stars kept pledging allegiance. “And to the principle of nuclear fusion. Luminous light, born from dust, nebula to stars, red giants to supernova, white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole!

The fugitive species learned that to survive at all they had to hide, and hide expertly. There were pockets of space where intelligence had not arisen in recent times—sterilised by supernova explosions, or neutron star mergers—and these cleansed zones made the best hiding places. But there were dangers. Intelligence was always waiting to emerge; new cultures were always evolving and spilling into space. It was these outbreaks of life which drew the predatory machines. They placed automated watching devices and traps around promising solar systems, ready to be triggered as soon as new spacefaring cultures stumbled upon them. So the grubs and their allies—the few that remained—grew intensely paranoid and watchful for the signs of new life.

The missiles would be packed full of fissionable material, and fission scared her nearly as much as antimatter. It was the dirty, nasty form of nuclear energy. Shut down a fusion reactor, and the only radioactive materials left were those that had been made radioactive by neutron bombardment. Shut down a fission reactor, and you had a deadly, possibly explosive pile of unstable elements with a half-life that meant they would stay hazardous for thousands of years.

People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren't they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity--we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires...

The collapsing star pushes past the resistance of crushed electrons, past the resistance of the neutrons. When the stellar material is compressed enough, the curves in spacetime around the collapsing mass become so sharp that even light can be caught in orbit. As collapse continues, light cannot escape the surface, as though the spacetime spills behind the crushed material faster than light can race outward. A horizon defining the region of no return, the event horizon, is inscribed in the very geometry of spacetime. The event horizon casts a lightless shadow, and a black hole has formed. The black hole is not a star anymore. It’s not really even a thing. The pulverized matter that cast the shadow of the event horizon continues to fall and is gone. The black hole is nothing but its shadow. Wheeler

Stars are bright, hot, rotating masses of gas which emit large quantities of light and heat as a result of nuclear reactions. Most newly-forming large stars begin to collapse under the weight of their own gravitational pull. That means that their centres are hotter and denser. When the matter in the centre of the star is sufficiently heated-when it reaches at least 10 million degrees Celsius (18 million degrees Fahrenheit)-nuclear reactions begin.56 What happens inside a star is that with enormous energy (fusion), hydrogen turns into helium. Nuclear fusion takes the particles that make up hydrogen and sticks them together to make helium (1 helium atom is made from 4 hydrogen atoms). In order to make the protons and neutrons in the helium stick together, the atom gives off tremendous energy. The energy released in the process is radiated from the surface of the star as light and heat. When the hydrogen is consumed, the star then begins to burn with helium, in exactly the same way, and heavier elements are formed. These reactions continue until the mass of the star has been consumed. However, since oxygen is not used in these reactions inside stars, the result is not ordinary combustion, such as that takes place when burning a piece of wood. The combustion seen as giant flames in stars does not actually derive from fire. Indeed, burning of just this kind is described in the verse. If one also thinks that the verse refers to a star, its fuel and combustion without fire, then one can also think that it is referring to the emission of light and mode of combustion in stars. (Allah knows best.)

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover.

There were aging orange embers, blue dwarfs, twin yellow giants. There were collapsing neutron stars, and angry supernovae that hissed into the icy emptiness. There were borning stars, breathing stars, pulsing stars, and dying stars. There was the Death Star. At

He created neutrons and surrounded them with helium nuclei. After making and arranging the elements, He transformed them into the prime building blocks. He fashioned black holes and set up giant red and dwarf white stars. He spread galaxies throughout, set up comets and moons, extracted light from darkness, and wove together strands of light as one does in weaving a fabric. He bound matter together and fashioned everything which He had created and which He was yet to fashion.

However, in other circumstances, such as with PSR 1913 + 16, the situation is very different, and gravitational radiation from the system indeed has a significant role to play. Here, Einstein's theory provides a firm prediction of the detailed nature of the gravitational radiation that the system ought to be emitting, and of the energy that should be carried away. This loss of energy should result in a slow spiralling inwards of the two neutron stars, and a corresponding speeding up of their orbital rotation period. Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse first observed this binary pulsar at the enormous Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. Since that time, the rotation period has been closely monitored by Taylor and his colleagues, and the speed-up is in precise agreement with the expectations of general relativity (cf. Fig. 4.11). For this work, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics. In fact, as the years have rolled by, the accumulation of data from this system has provided a stronger and stronger confirmation of Einstein's theory. Indeed, if we now take the system as a whole and compare it with the behaviour that is computed from Einstein's theory as a whole-from the Newtonian aspects of the orbits, through the corrections to these orbits from standard general relativity effects, right up to the effects on the orbits due to loss of energy in gravitational radiation-we find that the theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10^-14. This makes Einstein's general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science!

If you take neutron star material outside of the crushing gravity well where it’s normally found, it will re-expand into superhot normal matter with an outpouring of energy more powerful than any nuclear weapon.

His eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very dense stars that were almost black holes to large bloated neutron stars that had a neutron core and a white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans. “But the Crab Nebula pulsar is over 3000 light-years away!” Pierre exclaimed to himself. “They would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in the past eight hours!” A quick search through the index found the answer. FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI.

But another possibility is that a neutron star’s center contains exotic particles called kaons. This would lower the critical mass compared

Like the original concept, the stormrider had rectangular blades, sixteen of them radiating out from the hub, each one a flat lattice of struts twenty-five kilometers long, made from the toughest steelsilicon fibers the Commonwealth knew how to manufacture. Twenty-three kilometers of them were covered by an ultra-thin silvered foil, giving a total surface area of over one thousand eight hundred square kilometers for the solar wind to impact on. Even in an ordinary solar system environment that would have produced a considerable torque. In the Half Way system the stormrider was positioned at the Lagrange point between the red star and its neutron companion, right in the middle of the plasma current, where the ion density was orders of magnitude thicker than any normal solar wind. The power the stormrider produced when it was in the thick of the flow was enough to operate the wormhole generator. But it couldn’t simply sit at the Lagrange point producing electricity continuously; that would have been too much like perpetual motion. As the waves of plasma pushed against it, they exerted an unremitting pressure on the blades that blew the stormrider away from the Lagrange point out toward the neutron star. So for five hours the two sets of blades would turn in opposite directions, generating electricity for the Port Evergreen wormhole that was delivered via a zero-width wormhole. The stormrider also stored some of the power, so that at the end of the five hours when it was out of alignment, it had enough of a reserve to fire its onboard thrusters, moving itself even farther out of the main plasma stream where the pressure was reduced. From there it chased a simple fifteen-hour loop back around through open space to the Lagrange point, where the cycle would begin again.

A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh up to a couple billion tons, or half the weight of Mount Everest!

For all his silences, the man was about as self-effacing as a neutron star; light itself seemed to bend around him.

The idea of an anthropic principle began with the remark that the laws of nature seem surprisingly well suited to the existence of life. A famous example is provided by the synthesis of the elements. According to modern ideas, this synthesis began when the universe was about three minutes old (before then it was too hot for protons and neutrons to stick together in atomic nuclei) and was later continued in stars. It had originally been though that the elements were formed by adding one nuclear particle at a time to atomic nuclei, starting with the simplest element, hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of just one particle (a proton). But, although there was no trouble in building up helium nuclei, which contain four nuclear particles (two protons and two neutrons), there is no stable nucleus with five nuclear particles and hence no way to take the next step. The solution found eventually by Edwin Salpeter in 1952 is that two helium nuclei can come together in stars to form the unstable nucleus of the isotope beryllium 8, which occasionally before it has a chance to fission into two helium nuclei absorbs yet another helium nucleus and forms a nucleus of carbon. However, as emphasized in 1954 by Fred Hoyke, in order for this process to account for the observed cosmic abundance of carbon, there must be a state of the carbon nucleus that has an energy that gives it an anomalously large probability of being formed in the collison of a helium nucleus and a nucleus of beryllium 8. (Precisely such a state was subsequently found by experimenters working with Hoyle.) Once carbon is formed in stars, there is no obstacle to building up all the heavier elements, including those like oxygen and nitrogen that are necessary for known forms of life. But in order for this to work, the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus must be very close to the energy of a nucleus of beryllium 8 plus the energy of a helium nucleus. If the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus were too large or too small, then little carbon or heavier elements would be formed in stars, and with only hydrogen and helium there would be no way that life could arise. The energies of nuclear states depend in a complicated way on all the constants of physics, such as the masses and electric charges of the different types of elementary particles. It seems at first sight remarkable that these constants should take just the values that are needed to make it possible for carbon to be formed in this way.

Certain macroscopic objects directly display quantum mechanical effects. Superconductors and neutron stars-the latter behaving like atomic nuclei with a six-mile diameter-are macroscopic objects that cannot be described in terms of classical physics.

3He becomes a superfluid below 10−3 K, when its fermionic atoms pair up into bosons and condense. Similar condensation of paired fermions also occurs in neutron stars at about 106 K.

If you had a piece of neutron star about the size of a grape, it would weigh 100 million tonnes.

The study of the universe as a whole is a unique enterprise. At least in one sense one is seeking to understand the totality of things. We, as thinking beings, are as much a part of the universe as are neutron stars and white dwarfs and our destiny is inextricably bound up with that of the universe.

In life's vast universe, our emotions sometimes collapse and fade away like a dying neutron star, leaving behind a profound darkness that echoes the weight of our sorrows.

In the tranquil embrace of the night, a falling star whispers secrets to the cosmic dance, while a distant neutron star quietly guards its celestial realm, both unseen witnesses to the universe's silent symphony.

At that point I felt a surge of Anger, genuine, not to say Divine Anger. It flooded me from inside in a burning hot wave. This energy made me feel great, as if it were lifting me off the ground, a mini Big Bang within the universe of my body. There was fire burning within me, like a neutron star.

In 1933, the Indian Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar realized that the Pauli exclusion principle had only a limited ability to fight against the squeeze of gravity. As pressure in the star increases, the Pauli exclusion principle states that ekectrons inside must move faster and faster to avoid one another. But there's a speed limit: electrons cannot move faster than the speed of light, so if you put enough pressure on a lump of matter, electrons cannot move fast enough to stop the matter from collapsing. Chandrasekhar showed that a collapsing star that has about 1.4 times the mass of our sun will have enough gravity to overwhelm the Pauli exclusion principle. Above this Chandrasekhar limit a star's gravity will pull on itself so strongly that electrons can't stop its collapse. The force of gravity is so great that the star's electrons give up their struggle once and for all; the electrons smash into the star's protons, creating neutrons. The massive star winds up being a gigantic ball of neutrons: a neutron star.

Further calculations showed that when collapsing stars are a little more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit, the pressure of the resulting neutrons-similar to the pressure of electrons-can stave off collapse for a little while; this is what happens in a neutron star. At this point, the star is so dense that every teaspoon weighs hundreds of millions of tons. There is a limit, though, to even the pressure that neutrons can bear. Some astrophysicists believe that a little more squeezing makes the neutrons break down into their component quarks, creating a quark star. But that is the last stronghold. After that, all hell breaks loose. When an extremely massive star collapses, it disappears. The gravitational attraction is so great that physicists know of no force in the universe that can stop its collapse-not the repulsion of its electrons, not the pressure of neutron against neutron or quark against quark-nothing. The dying star gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Then...zero. The star crams itself into zero space. This is a black hole, an object so paradoxical that some scientists believe that black holes can be used to travel faster than light-and backward in time.

We’re talking about fundamentals here; the fundamental physical laws pertaining to the day-to-day running of the universe. Physicists call them the fundamental constants—things like the masses of atomic particles, the speed of light, the electric charges of electrons, the strength of gravitational force.… They’re beginning to realize just how finely balanced they are. One flip of a decimal point either way and things would start to go seriously wrong. Matter wouldn’t form, stars wouldn’t twinkle, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist and, if we insist on taking the selfish point of view in the face of such spectacular, epic, almighty destruction, nor would we. The cosmic harmony that made life possible exists at the mercy of what appear, on the face of it, to be unlikely odds. Who or what decided at the time of the Big Bang that the number of particles created would be 1 in 1 billion more than the number of antiparticles, thus rescuing us by the width of a whisker from annihilation long before we even existed (because when matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out)? Who or what decided that the number of matter particles left behind after this oversize game of cosmic swapping would be exactly the right number to create a gravitational force that balanced the force of expansion and didn’t collapse the universe like a popped balloon? Who decided that the mass of the neutron should be just enough to make the formation of atoms possible? That the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, in the face of their natural electromagnetic desire to repulse each other, should be just strong enough to achieve this, thus enabling the universe to move beyond a state of almost pure hydrogen? Who made the charge on the proton exactly right for the stars to turn into supernovas? Who fine-tuned the nuclear resonance level for carbon to just delicate enough a degree that it could form, making life, all of which is built on a framework of carbon, possible? The list goes on. And on. And as it goes on—as each particularly arrayed and significantly defined property, against all the odds, and in spite of billions of alternative possibilities, combines exquisitely, in the right time sequence, at the right speed, weight, mass, and ratio, and with every mathematical quality precisely equivalent to a stable universe in which life can exist at all—it adds incrementally in the human mind to a growing sense, depending on which of two antithetical philosophies it chooses to follow, of either supreme and buoyant confidence, or humble terror. The first philosophy says this perfect pattern shows that the universe is not random; that it is designed and tuned, from the atom up, by some supreme intelligence, especially for the purpose of supporting life. The other says it’s a one in a trillion coincidence.

Seiko slowly opened one eye. “Don’t be concerned, Doctor Wong, I was merely checking the tidal compensation,” she said, slightly annoyed at being interrupted. “At 406 kilometers from the neutron star, the tidal gravity gradient should be 101 gees per meter. Even though my middle is in free-fall, my arms, legs and head try to go in different orbits. My feet are one meter closer to the star and should feel a pull of 202 gees. My head is one meter further than my middle and should also feel a pull of 202 gees, while my arms should feel a push of 101 gees.

Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions

It asks us to ask not simply, “Why am I here?” but “Why is there anything anywhere? Why planets and stars and neutrons and hippos and quasars and swamps and anything at all?