Lead Historian and Record-Keeper of the Proclaimer Federation: Leston Marks...
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Every breath you take contains atoms forged in the blistering furnaces deep inside stars. Every flower you pick contains atoms blasted into space by stellar explosions that blazed brighter than a billion suns. Every book you read contains atoms blown across unimaginable gulfs of space and time by the wind between stars.

Astronomers often talk glibly of black holes and exploding stars, pulsars, quasars and the titanic eruption of the big bang. But if the truth be told is it is extremely difficult to believe that any of these things are actually real - as real, for instance, as a mountain or an oak tree or a newborn baby. They are simply too remote, too far removed from the familiar world of our experience. It seems inconceivable that they could have the slightest connection with out everyday lives.

But this is only a illusion.

Many of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring of the cosmic events - from the violent death throes of stars to the titanic fireball that gave birth to the entire universe 15 billion years ago - are connected to us directly by the way of the atoms that make up our bodies.

If the atoms that make up the world around us could tell their stories, each and every one of them would sing a tale to dwarf the greatest epics of literature. From carbon, baked in bloated red giants - stars so enormous they could swallow a million suns - to uranium, cooked in supernova explosions - just about the most violent cataclysms in all of creation. From boron, generated in atom-crunching collisions in the deep-freeze of interstellar space, to helium, forged in the hellish first few minutes of the big bang itself.

The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen that fills you lungs each time you take a breath - all were baked in the fiery ovens deep within stars and blown into space when those stars grew old, and perished. Every one of us is a memorial to long-dead stars. Every one of us was quite literally made in heaven.

For thousands of years, astrologers have been telling us that our lives are controlled by the stars. Well, they were right in spirit but not in detail. For science in the twentieth century has revealed that we are far more intimately connected to the events in the cosmos than anyone ever dared imagine. Each and every one of us is stardust made flesh.

The story of how we discovered the astonishing truth of our cosmic origins - how we found the magic furnace that forged that atoms - is one of the great untold stories of science. In fact, it is two stories intertwined: the story of atoms and the story of stars. Neither story an be told without the other. For the stars contain the key to unlocking the secret of atoms and the atoms the solution to the puzzle of the stars...

The story of the quest for the origin of atoms is the story of two great theories, and the pendulum that swung back and forth between them. One theory maintained that atoms were cooked inside stars then ejected into space to provide the raw material for new suns and new planets, while the other theory contended that atoms were assembled at the very birth of the universe, in the first blistering hot minutes of the big bang.

At first the pendulum swung to the stars as the most likely site of the elusive magic furnace. Then when it appeared that the stars were simply not hot enough for the job of cooking atoms, the pendulum swung to the big bang. When the big bang turned out not to be up to the job either, the pendulum swung back to the stars again - or at least most of the way to the stars. For nature, as we are so often reminded, is under no obligation to make things simple just for our convenience.

But before we were in any position to discover the cosmic origin of atomos, we first needed to realize that atoms were actually made and not put in the universe on Day One by the Creator. And before we could realize this truth we needed to realize something even more basic and far obvious: that everything is made of atoms . . .

-Work in Progress-

In the mists of antiquity, it must have occurred to many people to ask the question: what happens if I take this stick, this piece of cloth, this clay tablet, and cut it in half, then in half again. Can I go on forever? Or will I eventually reach a point when I will be unable to cut it any smaller? The first person to record an answer to this question was a Greek philosopher Democritus. This occurred to me throughout my vast studies of the historical artifacts that are preserved in the library of knowledge.

Little is known about Democritus. His ideas have come down to us solely through the writings of others. He was born around 470 BC, but no one knows quite where. He traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean and founded a school at Abdera in Thrace. Nowadays, the site is occupied by the Greek town of Avdhira near the border with Bulgaria, but in the fifth century BC it was a prosperous and bustling port on the shores of Aegean.

Democritus was obsessed by a single question: what is the nature of matter? The question had first been posed more than a century earlier by Thales of Miletus, the founding father of Greek philosophy, but its genius was to refine Thales' question. In the course of relentless, exhausting discussions with his teacher, Leucippus, he transformed what was a vague inquiry into a question of exquisite precision for which there could be only two alternative answers: Could matter be subdivided forever?

Democritus' answer was a emphatic no. It was absolutely inconceivable to him that any material object could be cut into smaller and smaller parts without limit. Sooner or later, he reasoned, such a cleaving process must result in a grain of matter that could not be made any smaller. Since the Greek phrase for 'uncuttable' was a-tomos, Democritus christened the indestructible grains out of which everything was made 'atoms'. By convention there is sweet, by convention there is bitterness, by convention hot and cold, by convention colour' he wrote. 'But in reality there are only atoms and the void.'

Atoms and the void.